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MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 
J.R. P. SCLATER, D.D. 





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MODERNIST 
FUNDAMENTALISM 


BY is ; a 0g a 
J. R. P.“SCLATER, D.D.\~. FEE T/ 19 < 


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NEW Y YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 
he 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


FOREWORD 


ELE present quarrel, between so-called 
Fundamentalism and Modernism, is un- 
questionably doing damage to evangelical re- 
ligion. Why this hoary dispute should have 
reappeared with such youthful vigour is a little 
difficult to understand. We might have 
thought that the historical study of the Bible 
had established, for good and all, the idea of a 
progressive revelation. Doubtless some mod- 
ernists are responsible for the fear, which has 
become dominant in many devout minds, that 
the Ark of God is in danger; but it is distress- 
ing to discover that there are still those who 
think that a reverent study of the text, the 
authorship and the date of the Scriptural 
books, can ever undermine their religious au- 
thority. In point of fact, grave-minded crit- 
icism has retained the position of the Bible, as 
the Regulator of faith and practice, for an 
innumerable company of thinking people, for 


whom the theory of mechanical, verbal inspira- 
Vv 


vl FOREWORD 


tion had made the Bible to be almost meaning- 
less; and it has done the added service of en- 
throning, more manifestly, Jesus Christ as the 
Lord of the Book. A scientific study of scrip- 
ture, which produces results like these, is not 
the enemy, but the friend, of evangelic faith; 
and if they will only perceive that this is what, 
in fact, the research of scholars has accom- 
plished, many hesitating and anxious people 
will be delivered from their fears. The object 
of this little book is to reassure them that this 
is the case. 

The chapters, which compose the book, were 
originaliy—although in a different shape— 
delivered as evening sermons in Old St. An- 
drew’s Church, Toronto, and subsequently ap- 
peared as articles in The New Outlook, to 
whose editors I am indebted for permission 
to publish them in this form. 


Old St. Andrew’s Church, Toronto. 
1926, 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


FuNDAMENTALISM: Wuat Is Iv? . . . 11 
MopernNism: WHat Is Ir? . 2 ww SC 88 
PISG@HGH, CRITICISM Pu a ia lee lome tide 33 
Tue Bipite as AUTHORITY . . .. . 43 
Tue BIBLE As THE WRITTEN Curist . . 55 


Tue Brisie as THE RvuLeE or FarirH AND 


ATT ORE Slr bg hi TL cmit ge leg crak eae kee Wee 79 
Tee Use of orTrHe (BIBLE). 600 ee 4 92 
Tue Finat Autuworiry .... . 104 


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MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 





MODERNIST 
FUNDAMENTALISM 


FUNDAMENTALISM: WHAT IS IT? 


T is singularly unfortunate that, at a time 

when the Church ought to be concentrating 
on its urgent and positive tasks, it should be 
agitated, and its forces dissipated, by the re- 
emergence of the strife between the Funda- 
mentalist and the Modernist—to use the 
popular, but misleading titles. We might 
have thought that this debate was over. It 
belongs properly to the closing quarter of the 
last century: and by this time Protestantism 
should have adjusted itself to what has been 
discovered to be true both in physical and Bib- 
lical enquiry; and should have known that the 
foundation is only thereby displayed as more 
abundantly secure. But it seems that we have 
reimported something of this venerable con- 


troversy from our neighbors to the south; al- 
11 


12 FUNDAMENTALISM: 


though we wish that they could have kept it 
for home consumption. And thus it becomes 
necessary to reassure our people that evangeli- 
calism is only strengthened when it is liberal: 
indeed, that it can continue to exist only when 
it is allied with that which is true. 
Christianity is the religion of redemption 
through Jesus Christ. Its two cardinal texts 
are, “God so loved the world that He sent His 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
on Him might not perish, but have everlasting 
life,’ and “God was in Christ reconciling the 
world unto Himself.” A “Modernism,” which 
denies that, is not Modernism, but ancient 
heresy; and no liberal evangelical, or serious- 
minded Higher Critic, departs from these ba- 
sic positions in the least degree. The cardinal 
doctrines of Christianity are the divinity of 
our Lord and the saving power of His Cross: 
and the “Modernism” which has a claim on the 
attention of serious men, holds with unhesi- 
tating hand to these fundamentals. At the 
same time, it is only reasonable to insist on the 
duty of a scholarly enquiry into the date and 
authorship of the Biblical books and to face 
the fact that, in many places, the text in the 


WHAT IS IT? 13 


original tongue is all but incomprehensible and 
requires the aid of scholarship before we can 
know what it was that the author wrote: and 
a man is faithless to truth if he does not ac- 
cept the assured results of such enquiry. As 
a result, it has come to be realized that the rev- 
elation of God, given in Scripture, is progres- 
sive, culminating in Jesus Christ: that the 
Bible is the written religious authority, but — 
that it contains the political, economic and sci- 
entific ideas of the times in which its books 
were composed; that, starting from these ideas, 
patient men have been led by the Spirit of 
Truth into clearer ideas of God’s working and 
will in the physical and social realm. The 
modernist would say that the scientific ideas 
of the early Hebrew race are no more binding 
upon us than their views on polygamy; also, 
that we have advanced to an evolutionary con- 
ception of the world is no more perturbing 
than that we have advanced to a monogamous 
view of the state. And, further, he would 
maintain, and maintain with reason and with 
passion, that such views upon the Bible do not 
touch religion in the slightest, nor affect, ex- 
cept to glorify Him the more, the Church’s 


14 FUNDAMENTALISM: 


one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our 
Lord. 

As against that position stands the Funda- 
mentalist, entrenched behind traditional au- 
thority. He is animated by a strong and dom- 
inating motive—the motive of fear: a fear 
which, as we shall see in a moment, is by no 
means altogether unworthy or unjustified. It 
expresses itself in different forms in different 
parts of the world. In the Roman Church it 
has been shown in the papal action directed 
against Abbé Loisy and Father Tyrrell and 
their confreres. In Anglicanism it is one of 
the main motives of the Anglo-Catholic move- 
ment. The anti-evolutionists of Tennessee 
and some, at least, of the Anglo-Catholics are 
intellectual brethren, however strenuously 
they might deny kinship: for both are en- 
trenching themselves in advanced positions 
against the oncoming of science and critical 
enquiry—a very imaginary enemy, for science 
never had nor can have anything to do with re- 
ligion, and critical enquiry, provided it is rev- 
erent and spiritual, is an unwavering ally. 
But, timorous for the ark of God, certain types 
of mind seem to need an external authority: 


WHAT IS IT? 15 


and so one type set up, as a breastwork, an 
infallible Church, and another an infallible 
Book. 

It is with the latter that we are concerned, in 
the circles in which we move. Christianity 
needs for its defence, the Fundamentalists say, 
the universal authority of the Bible. That 
idea, it is to be observed, involves two subsid- 
lary conceptions—(1) that the Bible is equal- 
ly authoritative in any department of human 
knowledge with which it deals, and (2) that 
it is equally valuable for truth in all its parts. 
Neither of these positions can be assented to, 
because the former neglects the fact that it 
was through human history that God slowly 
unveiled Himself and that inspiration is not 
dictation, but the touch of God’s Spirit upon 
human minds, who think normally, using the 
thought-forms of their own time; and because 
the latter is derogatory to the supreme posi- 
tion, in the Bible itself, of Jesus Christ, who in 
the Sermon on the Mount opposed His own 
authority to the vindictiveness of the ancient 
law. “Ye have heard that it hath been said 
. . . but I say unto you.” 

It would be easy to give many illustrations 


16 FUNDAMENTALISM: 


of the fact that the Bible develops in human 
knowledge and is not of equal “value” in all 
its parts. But one will suffice, taken from the 
supremely important department of ethics. 
Read again the closing verses of Psalm 137 or 
Psalm 109: and then begin at the seventh verse 
of the fourth chapter of the first Epistle of St. 
John and mark the difference. The two for- 
mer teach the importance and the duty of 
hate—unbridled, savage, implacable hate, ut- 
tering its malisons on the innocent children of 
our enemies. ‘Take them, smash them, brain 
them against the nearest stone and blessed art 
thou, cries the writer of Psalm 137. And in 
Psalm 109, the spirit of vengeance stands forth 
naked and unashamed. As for my enemy, let 
his wife be a widow and his children father- 
less and beggars for bread: and ghastly phrase 
—may his very prayer come before God as 
sin! No unrelenting curse could be blacker 
or more devastating. And then we turn to 
J ohn—“Beloved, let us love one another. He 
that loveth not, knoweth not God.” It is a 
sudden leap from darkness to light: and He 
who has brought us from the one to the other, 
is He who showed in His own life the loveli- 


WHAT IS IT? 17 


ness of love, when He cried, “Father, for- 
give them!”; who, while we were yet sinners, 
died for us. Our friends, who stand for the 
equal authority of all parts of the Scripture 
library, must surely have forgotten how, there- 
by, they are belittling the wonderful difference 
that Jesus has made: how, in their very anxi- 
ety to defend Him, they are attacking His 
moral Lordship. 

If this, then, be the ground of debate, the 
battle is over before it is begun. There is 
development in the long Scripture story, even 
in our knowledge of what a man should think 
and be to please God. If the Fundamentalist 
stands on the equal authority of all parts of 
Scripture, he stands against the truth as de- 
clared by Scripture itself and by his own con- 
science. Krom the dim beginnings of aware- 
ness of God, seen in half-lights by childish 
eyes, we come to His full unveiling, when His 
glory shone in the face of Jesus Christ. If 
there is development here, in this supreme re- 
gion, the discovery that there is also develop- 
ment in scientific knowledge is of very small 
concern. ‘The truth is that the Bible leads up 
to the moral and spiritual authority of Jesus, 


18 FUNDAMENTALISM: 


which needs no defence except itself; and the 
sane Modernist stands by the plain facts of 
the Bible’s development, because he knows 
that they do nothing but throw into more 
splendid relief the supremacy of the Bible’s 
Lord. 

But that contrast, stated alone, is hardly fair 
to the Fundamentalist’s position: for he would 
maintain, and truly maintain, that his one anx- 
iety is to secure his Lord’s rightful position in 
the thoughts of men. He is afraid that any 
apparent lessening of Biblical authority will 
end in easy thoughts of God and in the loss of 
the whole redemptive scheme of Christianity. 
For him, traditional views of the Bible are so 
inwrought with the Incarnation and _ the 
Atonement, that to depart from them will - 
bring the whole structure down in ruins. And 
the redemptive power of Christ is known by 
him to be true for the best of all reasons; he 
has tasted and seen how gracious the Lord is. 
He is aware directly of a transcendant, holy 
and separate God: he has felt, scorching him, 
the fiery flame of his own guilt and sin: alone, 
in the darkness, he has cried out for the living 
God to come and save him—and then, splen- 


WHAT IS IT? 19 


didly, there has drawn nigh to him the tender, 
majestic figure of the Saviour, and in the as- 
tonishment of His mercy and His love, he 
has found a strange, new hope and a peace 
which the world cannot give nor take away. 
And he knows it is true after the manner of the 
man of old time, who declared, “Whereas I 
was blind, now I see.” This he will not give 
up while he has any being: and if he feels that 
the Modernist is attacking that dear knowl- 
edge or making it harder for others to sit 
where he sits, what wonder that he is up in 
arms? And Modernists have only themselves 
to thank that he does so think. In a following 
chapter, we shall concern ourselves with some 
of the careless, light-minded folly that stains 
some Modernist utterances. For the moment, 
let us be content with saying that if criticism 
really endangered the truth of the redemption 
of the world, let us consider it once and yet 
again: and if, finally, we must accept conclu- 
sions that take away our Redeemer, let us 
do so with the despair of men who know that 
hope is dead and that, the light quenched, it is 
homeless night without. 

Oh! but it is not true. Let not the timorous 


20 FUNDAMENTALISM : 


be afraid. Search for truth will not damage 
the Truth. It is plain fact that of the men I 
have known who were living most securely in 
the faith of the Saviour, and who preached 
Him with the chiefest power, every one ac- 
knowledged the duty of scientific inquiry into 
the Scriptures and accepted its conclusions. 
A. whole page could be covered with their 
names. Let me mention just one. Of all 
evangelical ministries in Scotland in recent 
times, that of Dr. Whyte, “the last of the Puri- 
tans,” stands first. It was a heart-searching 
message they heard, week by week in Edin- 
burgh: and one note sounded all through it— 
the note of man’s desperate need of a Saviour 
and his need’s satisfaction in Jesus Christ. 
And yet Dr. Whyte was a “Modernist.” He 
defended Robertson Smith, a most challenging 
Higher Critic, when this same quarrel was 
forward in Scotland. “I will cast no stone at 
him,” cried he, ‘“‘no, nor will I hold the clothes 
of those who do.” His manse became a kind 
of committee-room for the defence of the ar- 
raigned professor; and in the Assembly he 
spoke passionately in his favor. Let us listen 
to Just one quotation: “Fathers and brethren, 


WHAT IS IT? 21 


the world of mind does not stand still. And 
the theological mind will stand still at its peril 
. . - I find no disparity, no difficulty in carry- 
ing much of the best of our past with me in 
going out to meet and hail the new theological 
methods. Of all bodies of men on the earth, 
the Church of Christ should be the most .. . 
courageous.” We need not be afraid of being 
removed from the fundamentals if we stand 
beside that old preacher. God grant that his 
temper may pervade all our Church. 


MODERNISM: WHAT IS IT? 


HE attitude of mind which is known as 
““Modernism”—a misleading title, for it 

is anything but modern—believes that it takes 
as its motto the Apostle’s advice to the Thessa- 
lonians: “Prove all things, hold fast that 
which is good.” ‘The Fundamentalists would 
doubtless say that the Modernists neglect the 
second part of the injunction, but the “Mod- 
ernism” that counts is alive to both pieces of 
advice, and maintains that the second is con- 
tingent upon the first. You cannot, they 
would say, know what the good is which you 
are to hold fast, until you have honestly exam- 
ined it: and that, therefore, before you can 
possess the true fundamentals, you must bring 
all things, including your religious authority 
itself, before the bar of reason. The Modern- 
ist, therefore, claims to be actuated by a love 
of truth, in its austere sense; and, if he can 
justify that claim, he at once ends the dispute 


in his favour. But implicit in his attitude there 
22 


MODERNISM: WHAT IS IT? 23 


lurk both a source of intellectual error and a 
spiritual danger: for he seems to indicate that 
truth can be reached by intellectual, or ratio- 
cinative, processes alone, and thereby exposes 
himself to the assaults of that “pride of intel- 
lect” whose ravages have been so sombrely 
portrayed for us by Dante. 

Before, however, we examine these posi- 
tions, a short digression into history will do no 
harm. Can nobody stop the use of these ab- 
surd terms, Fundamentalism and Modernism? 
They do not represent the two sides in this 
dispute in the very least: for the Fundamen- 
talists are contending for things that are not 
fundamental and the Modernists are not mod- 
ern. ‘This use of labels is one of the most ef- 
fective ways of chloroforming the mind. They 
are only quick ways of settling a dispute with- 
out the trouble of thinking. And, in any case, 
they are most unseemly on Protestant lips: 
for the term “Modernist” is an invention of 
the Roman Church for describing the efforts 
of some of her own most distinguished sons to 
escape from the shackles of Roman scholastic 
theology. ‘Towards the close of last century 
a movement arosé within that Church to do 


24 MODERNISM: 


three things—(1) to develop new philosophic 
and apologetic methods as distinguished from 
the methods derived from Aquinas, (2) to 
permit a candid study of the structure and 
meaning of the Scriptures, and (3) to make 
suitable to modern industrial conditions the 
traditional Roman attitude to the structure of 
society and the social question generally. 
There were noble names in that movement, 
such as those of Loisy and Tyrrell, but against 
their struggles for freedom the coercive might 
of the Roman authority acted as decisively as 
it usually does, and excommunication and the 
placing of their books on the Index Hwvpurga- 
torius ended their efforts at a new reforma- 
tion from within. And what in the world is 
Protestantism doing to borrow their nomen- 
clature? The Fundamentalists are in queer 
society, when they endeavour to stay the march 
of the human mind towards truth by the use 
of an epithet, and to a certain extent even of 
the methods, learned from the Vatican. We 
may wonder what Luther would think of them 
—Lwuther, the supreme challenger of author- 
ity and tradition, who would not accept even 
the New Testament as he found it, but turned 


WHAT IS IT? 25 


away contemptuously from the Epistle of 
James. The reason for the use of the term 
is plain enough: it wounds by implying a 
sneer; as if the attitude of mind which insists 
on examining authority were a mushroom 
growth of yesterday, whereas it is as old as" 
human reason. We find it in full vigour in — 
the book of Job, when, after the dreary tradi- 
tionalist and zealot had done their worst to 
comfort, that impatient young thinker, Elihu 
—modernist among the modernists—rushed in 
to talk impertinently indeed, but a good deal 
more effectively than the “miserable comfort- 
ers” who had preceded him. Discoveries may 
be modern: but the attitude of mind, which in- 
sists on the right to make them, is as ancient 
as the use of our reasoning faculties for the 
purposes for which God gave them. If ever 
we use the name “Modernist,” let us under- 
stand that we do so under protest. What we 
mean by it is the belief that, in its own region, 
reason stands supreme: that external author- 
ity for religion is subject to the examination 
of reason: and that accepted beliefs must go, 
if they are clearly incompatible with what is 


26 MODERNISM: 


otherwise known to be true. And these posi- 
tions, surely, appeal to all right-thinking men. 

The controversy, however, is by no 
means ended with that admission. For the 
Modernist is exposed to very real dangers, 
which unless guarded against, will lead him 
to error and spiritual confusion: and it is an 
appreciation of that fact that gives reality and 
depth to Fundamentalist anxiety. “Pride of 
Intellect” is the mother-sin, so some precep- 
tors tell us: “by that sin fell the angels”; and 
if a man is to claim supremacy for reason in 
its own sphere, he must be very clear as to 
what its limits are. Two extensions, in par- 
ticular, have to be avoided—(1) that intellect 
is self-sufficient for the discovery of truth, 
and (2) that intellect is self-sufficient for life: 
whereas, alas! a man does not live by mind 
alone: “it hath not pleased the Lord to save 
His people by dialectic.” 

As regards the former it is enough to say 
that the mind, before it begins to think, as- 
sumes truth. It has its own axioms which it 
does not bring before its own bar. It cannot 
work at all without assumptions. It needs 
its “laws of thought’—such as, that a thing 





WHAT IS IT? 27 


cannot both be and not be in the same respect 
at the same time. Moreover, the reason tends 
to work by analysis: and some of the ideas 
which are most important for life are impos- 
sible to analyze; as, for instance, love. Be- 
fore its mystery, the intellect stands defeated, 
“dark with excess of light.” Immediately we 
are faced with the fact that we cannot develop 
knowledge unless we are prepared to accept— 
provisionally, if you will, but nevertheless ac- 
cept—the dicta of intuition and authority in 
the regions where reason is inadequate. 

As regards the latter, it is enough to say 
that we have to live while we are enquiring 
and making up our minds. The devil does not 
grant us an armistice until we have formulated 
our doctrine of God, or settled the date of 
St. John’s Gospel. While the scholar is sit- 
ting at his desk, the forces of evil are loose in 
his heart: and unless he can call on God then 
and at once, things are likely to go hard with 
him: for he is a child of wrath even as others. 
And it is here that the Fundamentalist makes 
his challenge. “I, at least,” says he, “am con- 
cerned with the things that make for life. I 
may be stupid and ignorant: but I know that 


28 MODERNISM: 


I need a Saviour now. I cannot wait till all 
these questions are settled. I cannot endure 
the thought that you may be taking my Lord 
away from me and from my fellows. Prove 
to me that you put first things first: and that 
you, too, are concerned for the things that be- 
long unto salvation.” It is a challenge which 
the Modernist must take up gravely and mani- 
festly, or stand condemned. If the mass of 
men disconnect the Modernist with vital re- 
ligion, then, with an unerring instinct for 
value, they will turn elsewhere to find a 
draught of living water. 

Therefore, certain characteristics may rea- 
sonably be demanded of the Modernist. 

He must obviously be humble. ‘The smart 
epigrammatist—the clever who is “so rude to 
the good”—is a real public nuisance when he 
is dealing with religion. After all, “the dear 
Lord’s best interpreters are humble human 
hearts.” Indeed, the conceited intellectual 
juggler is not at heart a lover of truth at all, 
for no one has looked into the austere face of 
the real without gaining humility. “A child,” 
cries Newton of himself, “picking up pebbles 
on the shore of truth.” “Light, more light,” 


WHAT IS IT? 29 


whispers Goethe with his dying breath. Only 
by humility can men range themselves in the 
company of the shining ones who seek truth. 

Moreover, he ought to develop in himself an 
instinctive conservatism, and only be willing 
to give up a traditional belief when he must. 
After all, the new is not necessarily the true: 
in fact, the chances are that it is not. “What 
friends thou hast and their adoption tried, 
grapple them to thy soul with loops of steel” 
is a good piece of advice in respect of ideas 
as well as of men. The critics who have done 
most to commend those ideas of the structure 
of Scripture, which have been so serviceable 
in making faith possible in view of modern sci- 
ence, were naturally conservatively-minded 
men. Slowness to accept a new idea until it 
has been properly examined and tested is 
mark of mental gravity: and unwillingness to 
part with beliefs cherished by our fathers is a 
sign of mental good manners. Such men, 
when they are compelled by facts to accept a 
new theory, have far more influence in advanc- 
ing truth than the intellectual fly-by-nights, 
who chase after every latest guess as if it were 


30 MODERNISM: 


inspired, believing, apparently, that truth not 
only is born, but dies every day. 

Further, the Modernist must always think 
and speak reverently of those forms of ex- 
pression which have conveyed vital religious 
ideas in the past. Mental habits rapidly 
change and the garments with which thoughts 
were clothed in a former generation seem out- 
landish to the people of to-day: but if the 
thoughts were noble, the language which was 
allied to them is ennobled also. Take the 
strongest of all instances: take the instance 
which an older generation placed upon the 
Blood: 


There is a fountain filled with blood 
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins, 

And sinners plunged beneath that flood 
Lose all their guilty stains. 


Not often, in modern churches, do we hear 
the familiar lines: and, indeed, the imagery ~ 
sounds crude and material to some ears. There 
is a physical literalness in it which is not na- 
tive to many minds. But I wonder if a youth 
who, with a contemptuous smile, makes sport 
of it, realizes the sheer pain he is giving to 
people who have used these phrases to express 


WHAT IS IT? 31 


the undying reality that lies behind them. For 
these lines, and that conception, have set forth 
to men the self-giving Love of God in all its 
active passion to redeem. ‘They have re- 
minded the heavy-hearted of the source of all 
peace and hope—the Love that is known in 
the wounded heart of Christ. They have been 
associated with that final spiritual loveliness 
and majesty which is the Cross set in the heart 
of God for ever: and they are, therefore, them- 
selves set apart. If a Modernist is to com- 
mend the Gospel, he must be sensitive to asso- 
ciations so great and so noble. 

And, finally, the Modernist must be reli- 
gious and concerned for religion. For, after 
all, it is only the man who is himself seeking 
God, who has the necessary data for estimat- 
ing religious truth. It is the underlying sus- 
picion that Modernists are not evangelically 
in earnest that is at the root of mueh of our 
trouble: and for that suspicion some Modern- 
ists have only themselves to thank. I have 
known some conspicuously alert men intellec- 
tually, well-versed in critical problems, to 
whom I would never think of going if I were in 
trouble, for I gravely misdoubt whether they 


32 MODERNISM: WHAT IS IT? 


either know or care much about the cure. Not 
that that is generally, or even widely, true. 
The most earnest evangelic forces I have 
known have all, without exception, accepted 
the modern point of view. But if a man at- 
tacks tradition, it is all the more necessary 
that he should make it quite clear that it is in 
the name of religion that he does so: and that 
his chief concern, for himself as for others, is 
to be able to say from experience “whereas I 
was blind, now I see.” 


HIGHER CRITICISM 


T is high time that we all unanimously said 

boo! to the bogey, which some folk have 
created, called “higher criticism.” For, as it 
is imagined by those who are afraid of it, it 
is as real as a scarecrow. 'To hear some people 
speak you would imagine that it was a dark 
rite practised only by atheists: whereas, in 
plain fact, it is the best friend of those who are 
anxious to accept the true authority of the 
Bible. 

Now, what is this thing that so alarms kindly 
minds? The answer is very simple: it is the 
study of the Bible to discover the age and au- 
thorship of its component books. The word 
“criticism” is singularly unfortunate in Eng- 
lish, for it seems to suggest study with a view 
to disparagement. As a matter of fact, it is 
the English equivalent of a Greek word which 
means discrimination or judgment and may 
equally suggest study with a view to display- 


ing excellence. Biblical scholarship is in that 
33 


34 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


sense “critical.” When it is a study of the 
words of themselves, in order to discover what 
the authors actually wrote, it is “lower or 
textual criticism.” “Higher criticism,” on 
the other hand, attempts to find out who wrote 
the words and when—a truly admirable and 
useful object of enquiry. 

But, it may be asked, why worry?) Why not 
simply accept the traditional views of author- 
ship and age, and save the brains and time of 
scholars for something practical? The an- 
swer is plain: the traditional views of date and 
authorship render the Bible unintelligible, and 
in defence of the credibility of the Bible, our 
scholars in our colleges must get busy. 

The existence and nature of the problems 
which higher criticism sets out to solve are 
doubtless familiar to all Biblical students. 
For instance, the traditional view of the au- 
thorship of the first five books of the Old Tes- 
tament is that they were written by Moses. 
But in Deut. 34 we find an account of Moses’ 
death and burial, and an estimate of the great 
prophet’s character and personality, which is 
not only clearly written from the viewpoint 
of a much later time, but singularly vainglori- 


HIGHER CRITICISM 35 


ous if written by the prophet himself. Did 
Moses really write his own obituary notice: 
and had he such an immodest opinion of him- 
self? The Bible becomes magical and Moses a 
truly unpleasant person, if he did. Moreover, 
there are many double accounts, often differ- 
ent in important details, of the same event. It 
was a perception of the double account of the 
creation in the first two chapters of Genesis 
that led to the beginning of modern higher 
criticism in 1680. ‘The best instance of all, 
perhaps, is the triple account of the slaying of 
Goliath. In 1 Samuel 17 we read that David 
killed him: in 2 Samuel 21: 19 we read that 
Elhanan killed him: in 1 Chronicles 20:5 we 
read that Elhanan killed the brother of Goli- 
ath. (In the authorized version, it is true that 
in 2 Samuel 21: 19 we read that Elhanan killed 
the brother of Goliath, but the words “the 
brother of” are in italics, to show that they do 
not occur in the Hebrew: and the revisers, very 
properly and honestly have omitted them.) 
Now, you will not deny that that creates a 
problem: and it is a blessing that we have the 
higher critics to explain to us the differing 


36 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


sources from which the Scripture historians 
drew their divergent accounts. 

Still further, events separated by long 
stretches of time are spoken of as present facts 
in the same book, as for instance in the Book 
of Isaiah. Again, it is a blessing that higher 
critics have saved us from the incomprehen- 
sible by showing us that the writings of at 
least two great men of God are incorporated 
in the book of Isaiah, and have thereby added 
another to the noble galaxy of inspired wri- 
ters. And, finally, language-forms occur in 
books supposed traditionally to be written be- 
fore these language-forms existed. The prob- 
lem thus created is quite intolerable apart 
from the relief which the higher critics give. 
To take a crude illustration from our modern 
speech, supposing some one said that he had 
discovered a poem by Shakespeare, begin- 
ning with the lines: 


“E’en as a Ford goes on its glorious way, 
But stalls completely in the village street.” 


Would you admit the Shakespearian author- 
ship? Why, you would say that North Amer- 
ica itself was a dim kind of thing in the poet’s 


HIGHER CRITICISM 37 


time: and that certainly Detroit had not swum 
into his ken, neither did he talk of “stalling” 
in that sense. And if your informant had 
given you a choice between acceptance of his 
view of the authorship and excommunication, 
either your mind or your soul would have 
been hurt. Similar, if not quite so vivid, prob- 
Jems exist in Scripture when traditional views 
on authorship are insisted on: and once again 
we may bless the higher critics for showing us 
a more excellent way. 

But, it may be said, these solutions of 
the problems destroy the inspiration of the 
Bible. If by inspiration we mean mechanical 
dictation, the charge is true: and a good thing, 
too, for, whatever the Bible is, it is neither 
mechanical nor dictated. But if by inspira- 
tion we mean that its writers were used and 
guided by God to record for us His own slow 
unfolding of Himself, the charge is as far 
from truth as well may be imagined. We 
must remember that no Scriptural historical 
writer claims inspiration for his material: it is 
in its selection, arrangement and use that he 
is Inspired. Canon Driver’s admirable words 
should be pondered: “Criticism in the hands 


88 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


of Christian scholars does not banish or de- 
stroy the inspiration of the Old Testament. 
It presupposes it. It seeks only to determine 
the conditions under which it operates, and the 
literary forms through which it manifests it- 
self.” After all, however, this is a compara- 
tively small matter, for the “discriminating” 
view of the Old Testament is supported by 
the New Testament, and in the New ‘Testa- 
ment by the supreme authority of all, Jesus 
Christ. For He “discriminated” concerning 
the law: and of all parts of the Old Testa- 
ment the law might have been regarded as 
sacrosanct. Read again the second half of 
Matthew 25: note the sharp divergence of 
the recurring “Ye have heard that it was said 
by them of old time . . . but I say unto you,” 
and deny, if you can, that conclusions as to 
the varying authority of Scripture have His 
sanction. Nor are the apostles more bound 
than He to a rigid theory of verbal dictation. 
They sometimes quote from the Hebrew; 
sometimes from the Greek version of the He- 
brew, when the latter varies from the former; 
and sometimes they misquote. No higher 
critic is more free in practice from verbal in- 


HIGHER CRITICISM 39 


spiration than they are. And, indeed, that 
venerably erroneous view as to the structure of 
Scripture cannot live for a moment when we 
remember the problems which lower or textual 
criticism has to solve. For the text of con- 
siderable passages, e.g., in the Psalms or in 
Hosea, is in confusion in our manuscripts. 
Our lovely and loved English translation is 
due, in part, to wonderful guesses at the orig- 
inal intention of the writer. Nor is it a mat- 
ter for astonishment that mistakes have been 
made in copying the ancient books. Hebrew 
is a difficult language to read with good eyes 
in a good light; and it is a worse to write. The 
old copyists must often have been aging men, 
working with dim illumination, when their 
eyes were beginning to fade in a world which 
had not yet produced spectacles. ‘They were 
bound to make copying errors; and so they 
did, until in some passages the original, as 
written, does not make sense. It is incredible 
that the mechanical theory of inspiration 
should have held the field as long as it has, in 
face of such plain facts. It is pitiable that it 
should be showing its burdensome features 
again at this time of day. There is no ques- 


40 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


tion that it was the direct cause of the depart- 
ure of many of our best young minds from 
religious faith altogether. Sir G. A. Smith, 
in his Old Testament and Preaching (p. 27), 
has a passage which we should read and con- 
sider. He tells how, when he was going 
through the correspondence of Henry Drum- 
mond, he came upon countless letters from 
young men, who were being driven from faith 
because they could not accept the view of the 
Bible, which the Fundamentalists are trying 
to force on us again, and who were writing to 
Drummond to find some easement. Principal 
Smith describes the position as a “tragedy,” 
that men longing for Christ should be driven 
from Him because their minds refused assent 
to a view of Scripture which was untrue. I 
can add a little footnote to that passage. For 
a period I was responsible in Edinburgh for 
the work Drummond inaugurated among the 
students. Hundreds of questions were sent 
to me about religious difficulties, but never one 
(that I remember) about the verbal inspira- 
tion of the Bible. Young Scotland accepted 
the Word of God, without the fetters. Not 
a single student was driven from Christianity 


HIGHER CRITICISM 41 


by Old Testament discrepancies: and the 
Bible was a more compelling authority than 
ever, because they all knew that its authority 
was spiritual. And who had made that won- 
derful difference? Who had made faith pos- 
sible for Scottish youth? None but the wise, 
patient, Christ-loving higher critics of our 
Church. Let us thank God for them. 

Where, then, do we stand? What is it that 
this reverent study of the Word has given us? 
Four gifts, at least. 

It has given us a Bible in which we see an 
unveiling of God in the development and his- 
tory of a chosen people. We mark in it a 
majestic movement from the tribal deity up 
to the God of the New Covenant. And He 
stands out all the clearer, because of the hu- 
man history through which He is known. 

It has given us a Bible, in which we get the 
record of the vision of God directly perceived 
by chosen souls—souls who could say “but we 
musicians know.” And we mark in it how 
these direct perceptions supplement one an- 
other, until mercy and truth kiss one another 
in God. 

It has given us a Bible, in which His right 


42 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


glory and supremacy are given to Him who 
is the express image of the Father, even Jesus 
Christ. He has become Lord of the Book. 
And it has given us a Bible which shuts up 
the soul alone with God. Not with politics: 
not with science: but with God. 

Perhaps you~ will permit me one other 
word. There is one soul that is always 
unconsciously a critic, in the noble sense—and 
that is the devout soul. A Bible lies on my 
desk, which once lay near the hand of one very 
dear to me. If you close it and look at the 
edge of its pages, you will find that three parts 
of it are frayed from constant use—the 
Psalms, John’s Gospel and 1 Corinthians. One 
page is loose—the page on which Corinthians 
1:13 is printed. Ah! there is bound to be 
“discrimination,” when people are in earnest, 
and come to the Bible to find God. In that 
spirit come to this great library, and He will 
not fail to meet you in His Word. 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 


O one can impartially read the Bible and 

fail to notice the accent of authority 
which rings through it. It seems all the time 
to be demanding not only the attention, but 
the allegiance, of its readers. It states rather 
than argues: proclaims rather than persuades. 
And the Church, very much alive to this spir- 
itual regality, has acknowledged the authori- 
tative position in faith and practice of this su- 
preme library. But the authority of books is 
inwrought with their truth: and this at once 
raises a question for some minds. “If you ac- 
cept the conclusions of the Higher Critics,” 
they ask, “how can you hold to the belief that 
the Bible is true? For the critics hold that, in 
some of its historical statements, the Bible dis- 
agrees with itself, and, in others, disagrees 
with that which has otherwise been discovered 
to be true. And if any one Scriptural state- 
ment is proved erroneous, confidence in all 


the rest is shaken.” 
| 43 


44. MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


Involved in this, of course, is a conception 
of the mechanical unity of Scripture. It is 
true that, in a machine, the collapse even of 
an insignificant part of it throws the whole 
machine out of use. In an automobile there 
is, for instance, a mysterious something known 
as a commutator: if it goes wrong (as some 
of us by painful experience know), the wheels 
will shortly stop going round. ‘The little rift 
within the lute likewise, as the poet very 
justly observes, makes all the music mute. But 
of course, the Bible is not a machine: it is a 
national literature, extending over hundreds, 
or possibly thousands, of years. And some 
of us find it difficult to understand how the 
accuracy of a quotation from an ancient col- 
lection of hero-songs, about the sun standing 
still on Ajalon, affects the perception of a 
man who lived centuries later, and in the bright 
vision of his own heart saw the God of the 
New Covenant. A scientific mistake in Chau- 
cer does not make Browning less of a teacher 
in the strange ways of human nature. The 
fact is that, until we get rid, once and for all, 
of any mechanical conceptions of Scripture, 
We are not going to get on much farther. If 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 45 


ever a collection of books was living and grow- 
ing, that collection is the Bible. 

Moreover, when we enquire into the “truth” 
of the Bible (or anything else), we are using 
one of the two or three terms which it is at 
once most necessary and most difficult to de- 
fine. A statement, a fantasy, a drama, a pic- 
ture, a promise and a man can all be “true” — 
and the adjective means something different 
in each connection. The logicians used to ad- 
vise us to have special regard to the “universe 
of discourse” in which, at any time, we might 
be mentally moving: for a statement may be 
true in one universe of discourse and false in 
another. For instance, we all know Steven- 
son’s grim allegory, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
If any one asks us if we regard it as true, we 
must answer (if we would be accurate), Yes 
and No. In the universe of discourse of pure 
history it has no relation to truth whatever. 
No eminent doctor was ever able to alter com- 
pletely his body: no drug ever existed, which 
could turn a man of five feet six inches into 
one of six feet two inches, or could tip-tilt a 
Roman nose. It is all pure nonsense from the 
point of view of history. But in the universe 


46 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


of discourse of things spiritual, it is horrible, 
ghastly truth. We all know our own Edward 
Hyde, that leering, snaky indweller of our own 
souls, who will leap out and become the thing 
we are, unless continually we lay hold on the 
cleansing power of God. Similarly, what is 
the use of asking if the Bible is “true”? It all 
depends on the mental sphere to which we hap- 
pen to be moving. We get all sorts of truth 
in the Bible: and if we insist on turning them 
all into one sort we are asking for trouble. 
The main point is that, in sundry manners, 
there is contained in it all that is necessary to 
guide us in the path that leads to God, who is 
our Home. 

The main difficulties, however, seem to arise 
when the Bible is, apparently, giving us plain, 
historic truth. A great deal of the records 
consists in the accounts of the development of 
the Hebrew people: and therein there would 
appear to be no movement in any universe of 
discourse except that of ordinary history. But 
the critics discover statements that clash with 
present knowledge. How, then, can the Bible 
be regarded as historically true? In answer 
to that, we point to the fact that history tells 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 47 


us not only what happened in the past, but 
what men thought in the past: and that it is 
more important to know the latter than the 
former, for thereby we perceive how mental 
progress comes to be. Now, the Bible, if it is 
to tell us what men thought in the past, must 
contain error. Only that history which sets 
forth the mistaken ideas of the past is true 
history: and if the Bible contained nothing 
that was contradictory to our knowledge of 
to-day it would be false history. The fact 
that the Bible sets forth such ideas as true only 
indicates that it is writing from the point of 
view of that time. The men of that day be- 
lieved these things: and the fact that they be- 
lieved wrongly does not alter the fact that the 
Bible, in conveying their errors, is conveying 
historic truth. 

Now it is important to get this simple idea 
clear. ‘There is progress of every sort in the 
Bible, because there is, thank God, progress 
in humanity. The early, dim ideas are re- 
corded for us in order that we may see how 
the Divine Educator of men slowly and with 
infinite patience drew us from ignorance to 
knowledge, from darkness to light. If there 


48 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


were no error in the ideas of the men of long 
ago—errors about the world and its structure 
and its begetting, about society, about duty, 
about God—there would be no need for God 
to discipline men and chastise them and exile 
them. Indeed, it is only when we perceive 
how mistaken men were long ago in their ideas 
that we begin to get a philosophy of history 
that has God in the heart of it. The long 
pain of the Hebrew people is explained to us 
when we realize out of what foolish thoughts 
of God they had to be drawn, before they 
knew the God that is: and it does not affect 
the truth of the Bible in the least that these 
foolish thoughts are recorded for us precisely 
as they appeared to the men who thought them 
—rather the reverse in fact, for it makes the 
record more living and more convincing. 

Let us take a concrete example. We all 
know the story of the frustrated sacrifice of 
Isaac by his father. As the records give it to 
us, God commanded Abraham to slay his son 
—which is precisely what Abraham thought 
He did. We know perfectly well, thanks to 
Jesus, that God, our Heavenly Father, never 
wanted human sacrifice. To our knowledge 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 49 


of to-day, since the Light of the world has 
shined, such an idea would be an affront. Any 
man who proposed to take his own boy and 
smash the life out of him to please God, would 
be shut up at once in an asylum for the in- 
sane. And we know, too, that God does not 
change: He is the same yesterday, to-day and 
forever: the slaughter of innocents never 
gained His tender favour. Nor did the right- 
eous God ever tempt men to sin. But—and 
this is the point—men actually did think, at 
one time, that the only way to please Him 
was to immolate some fair human offering on 
His grim altar. They believed the voice of 
God called them so to do: and if the Bible 
had not indicated that they did so it would 
have been a false record. So it, accurately, 
and honestly, puts down the statement, so com- 
manding in men’s minds and conscience of 
long ago, that God ordered this thing. The 
Bible truly records these monstrously untrue 
thoughts—and so, ultimately, made more glo- 
rious the Person who, for good and all, sent 
the horrid brood of them shuddering back into 
the darkness whence they sprang. And, at 
the same time, the Bible in this story records 


60 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


the upward leap of the human conscience, 
when in place of a man it substitutes a ram: 
but there was a long way to go before hu- 
manity was to reach the place of the true 
knowledge of God’s desires—a way marked 
by discipline and pain, and failure,—until at 
last men know that the sacrifices of God are 
a broken and a contrite heart. Thus, go to 
the Bible to find what men thought; and often 
you will find what they thought wrongly. 
But also you will find how God taught them 
and trained them to think right: you will find 
the great, continual, educational ministry of 
God set in relief: until at last they see the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Further, while the Bible conveys much of 
its message through history, it is a spiritual 
message which it is concerned to convey: and 
it conveys it in different ways, suited to dif- 
ferent times. Very often it is the spiritual 
parallel, underlying apparent history, that we 
are to seek: and sometimes the history is only 
apparent—in reality it is allegory. 

We may occasionally permit ourselves to 
regret that the interpretation of the Bible, and 
the guardianship of Christianity, have been 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 51 


so much left to that queer, competent, but de- 
cidedly limited mongrel, the Anglo-Saxon. 
Christianity and the book which enshrines its 
growth and teaching have mysticism at their 
heart: and the Anglo-Saxon is the last person 
on earth to understand some aspects of a re- 
ligion or a book like that. For he calls a spade 
a spade: and instinctively becomes suspicious 
in the presence of thoughts that transcend 
speech—particularly his speech: and he is not 
given to admitting that other methods of ex- 
pression than his own are reasonable. Decent, 
honest, downright, unimaginative soul—what 
a mess he has made of the Book of Jonah: 
how successfully he has “turned God’s poetry 
into prose.”’ Now, each Biblical writer, on the 
other hand, moved naturally in the region of 
image and of allegory. He expressed his deep- 
est aspirations in pictures: he gave us the 
Beloved Community in a four-square city, 
shaped like a cube. And if we are to get at 
the truth of his writings we must continu- 
ally be reaching back, through the thing said, 
to the thing signified. When we do, we fre- 
quently find that the apparently historical 
merges into the permanently spiritual, and 


52 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


discover in that latter region the unassailable 
truth which the Bible is conveying. A man 
who has read Jonah, without seeing its uni- 
versal spiritual significance, has not begun to 
understand what that great book is. And in 
the New Testament some puzzling incidents 
need to be “spiritualized” to be understood. 
Take, for instance, the story of the miraculous 
draught in John, when the fishers took on 
board their craft “one hundred and fifty and 
three” fish from the sea after Christ came nigh 
them. In old days, as those strange amalgams 
of natural history and piety, the Bestiaries, 
tell us, men believed that there were one hun- 
dred and fifty-three kinds of fish in the sea. 
One of every sort was taken, once the Lord 
came nigh. And that at once hints the spiri- 
tual significance of the incident. The ship is 
the Church and the sea is the world. For long 
the Church labors fruitlessly, for the power of 
the presence of the Lord is lacking. And then 
He comes, in His risen power, and representa- 
tives of every nation and people are swung 
into His keeping and into the fellowship of 
His Church, Who first (as far as I know) 
preached on that incident in that way? Why, 


THE BIBLE AS AUTHORITY 53 


Augustine—that great defender of the faith: 
and until men, like him, will seek for the spir- 
itual reality that is thus permanently taught 
us, they have no business to be calling the 
Bible either true or untrue: for they have not 
discerned its purpose. 

And then, finally, within the Bible there 1s, 
plain as a pikestaff, that which is true for each 
man as he reads it. He knows it is true: for 
the spirit within him responds to it. The In- 
dwelling Divine answers to the Word of God. 
And it will not do—it simply will not do—for 
us to hesitate or doubt about the authority of 
that which we know to be true, because else- 
where in so extensive a library there are state- 
ments which we hesitate to accept, or which 
are made in a manner foreign to our minds. 
The clear, unexpugnable demands and teach- 
ings of Jesus shine out in their authority, en- 
tirely untouched by the guesses at truth of men 
who only dimly foresaw His day. If we allow 
the floating axe or the Gadarene swine to blur 
for us the teachings of our Lord, we are simply 
not in earnest. We are not listening to the 
voice that speaks within. For here no qual- 
ifications, no explanations about universes of 


54 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


discourse, are necessary. In a language ap- 
prehended alike of Anglo-Saxon and of He- 
brew, of Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, 
the Lord tells us what we must do and what 
the God of the Redeeming Love has done, is 
doing and will do for ever. And because the 
Bible leads up to and enshrines Him, so long 
as men call Him Lord, no man need trouble 
about its authority. 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN 
CHRIST 


HE Bible, like the Christian religion, has 
Christ in the centre. The Old Testa- 
ment points to Him—unconsciously, it may 
be, but nevertheless points to Him. The 
Epistles meditate upon Him and unfold His 
consequences. The Gospels tell the story of 
His life. The significance of the Bible would 
fade, with Him away; for all its treasures are 
gathered into one, even in Him. It is largely 
to emphasize that so obvious, so illuminative 
and so Christian fact that this book is written. 
It is not necessary to develop the statement 
that He is the centre of our faith, and that no 
- man cometh to the Father but by Him. Chris- 
tianity is best defined in the words of Bishop 
Gore, as “faith in’ a certain Person, Jesus 
Christ.” In our theology, as in our religion, 
it is a case of Jesus in the midst, or both our 
theology and our religion—two different 


things by the way—will automatically cease 
BB 


56 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


to be Christian. But we are not always so 
alive to the fact that Christ is in the centre of 
the history which the Biblical records relate. 
The two elect societies culminate and proceed, 
respectively, from Him. In Him the chosen 
people fulfil their destiny: from Him the 
Church of God takes its spring. It is hardly 
possible to imagine a more vivid and dramatic 
consummation of a national purpose than that 
which the Hebrew people afford when, after 
their amazing preservation and development, 
their achievements in prosperity and in dis- 
aster, they are blown by the winds of heaven 
and scattered to the ends of the earth at the 
coming of Christ. We read of them appear- 
ing out of nowhere—nomads amongst the 
peoples of the world; drinking the bitter wa- 
ters of slavery and yet preserving their na- 
tional quality; led by their wars of destiny 
through inconceivable dangers, until at last 
they dwell secure in their promised land: pre- 
served there, although it contained the plain 
of Esdraelon, that cockpit of the ancient world 
—that Belgium of the East; giving birth to 
the greatest sequence of religious geniuses the 
world has ever known, in their prophets; re- 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 57 


taining their noble endowments amidst the bit- 
terness of exile, until they could flower again 
in the happy days of restoration; guarded as 
no people has been guarded, though menaced 
on either side by the jealousy of mighty em- 
pires: till the Babe of Bethlehem grown into 
a man, died on Calvary—and then, their pur- 
pose achieved, they disappear amongst the 
races of the earth, like a river that has at last 
found its sea. In their place, a new people 
arise, drawn from every tongue and kindred 
and nation, when the Church of Christ begins 
to spread in the world. And in the midst, be- 
tween the chosen nation and the chosen society 
out of every nation, stands the lone, majestic 
figure of Jesus Christ. 

Herein we discern the supreme value and 
vital importance of the Bible. It is the written 
Christ: it contains the only record of His life: 
it is the only source to which we can go to learn 
of the historical Jesus. Other historical ref- 
erences are slight and meagre: for our knowl- 
edge of the “years lived out beneath the Syr- 
ian blue” we are dependent on the Scriptures: 
and therefore, it is not possible to exaggerate 
their importance. But, if we put Him in the 


58 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


central place, the varying value of the records 
becomes at once apparent. We learn of Him, 
indeed, in the Old Testament, through the 
diverse expectations of the Ideal King and the 
Suffering Servant, which were both so strange- 
ly fulfilled in Him. We learn of Him viv- 
idly, in the impressions left on the minds of 
His friends and in what they held to be im- 
plicit in Himself and in His teaching. But 
chiefly we learn of Him in the actual records 
of His life and sayings—especially in the first 
three Gospels, and above all, in Mark. It is 
a small thing to say that these three books 
form, by far, the most important historical 
documents in this world. They are of more 
significance than any other records in the pre- 
cise degree that Jesus is more significant than 
any other person who ever lived. Wherefore, 
let us touch them devoutly, as a man would lay 
a hesitating, reverent hand upon the garments 
of the Lord Himself. 

Now, the Synoptic Gospels purport to be, 
in the main, plain historic truth. While they 
contain teaching in the parabolic form, they 
make it clear what is parable and what is not. 
And, even if here and there an allegoric inter- 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 59 


pretation can be supported (as certainly can 
be attempted in some passages in John), the 
manifest intent of Matthew, Mark and Luke 
is to relate the actual words that issued out of 
Jesus’ lips and the actual occurrences of His 
life. The fact that both Matthew and Luke 
were writing with particular objects in view, 
while it exalts the importance of Mark, who 
had no concern with Jewish or Gentile propa- 
ganda, does not alter the historical method 
which they both employed. Matthew, doubt- 
less, wanted to win his own race to Christian 
allegiance; while Luke was anxious to gather 
the Gentiles within the fold. But this only af- 
fects the selection and emphasis of their ma- 
terial. Both were equally in earnest to con- 
vey historical facts, in the sense in which we 
commonly use that term—in fact, Luke specif- 
ically says so in regard to his own work, in the 
opening verses of his first chapter. In these 
three Gospels, then, we are dealing with pu- 
tative history, in the ordinary sense of the 
word; and as history we must judge them. 
All of which is a great mercy, for it is of 
the first importance that the divine Jesus 
Christ should be a historical fact. There are, 


60 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


indeed, some who say, and seem to think, other- 
wise. ‘To them Jesus is a veiled, nebulous 
figure—a prophet of whom we know very lit- 
tle, who was put to death for His apocalyptic 
views and from whom the Christ-idea sprang, 
somehow, out of the aspirations of mankind. 
There is, of course, a distinction which can be 
drawn between Jesus and the risen Christ, 
which it is well always to bear in mind. Fun- 
damentalist literature frequently neglects it. 
Jesus is the actual, physical being who walked 
this earth, made in fashion as a man and sub- 
ject, as Philippians tells us, to the limitations 
of humanity; while the risen Christ is the glori- 
ous object of our worship, eternal in the heart 
of God. It is the distinction between the 
divinity of Jesus and the deity of the risen 
Christ. But that is a very different thing from 
holding that the Christ is the personification 
of a human longing, sprung from the idealiza- 
tion of a vague, prophetic figure, whose his- 
tory is only legend. If we are to draw any dis- 
tinction, it must be between the Divine in hu- 
man form and the Divine beyond human form 
—a perfectly valid and orthodox distinction, 
as Origen would have told us. But we cannot 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 61 


afford to give up the Divine in human form: 
we cannot get along without the statement that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world to 
Himself: for, if we do, we are retaining a 
Christianity with the bottom knocked out of 
it. Carlyle is reported to have said that he 
could believe in God, “if He would do some- 
thing’: and our only answer to that has been 
to point to Jesus Christ. 

But if God was not in Christ, then (as far 
as we know) God has done nothing. Hu- 
manity has done it all: and our Maker is some 
far-off aloofness, sitting in His chill chambers 
in the high and lofty place, blind to the tears 
of earth, deaf to the cries that echo from this 
“sad sister among the stars.” Far better that 
there be no God: far better that the crown 
should fall on humanity’s repugnant brow— 
for man at least can love! 

In a situation so serious and so momentous, 
we owe a debt past measurement to the grave 
students, whom men call critics; for they have 
authenticated the records for us, and we can 
be confident that in them we have a living 
portrait of Jesus. Things had gone pretty 
far, when modern students (many of them we 


62 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


may proudly remember, in our own Church) 
took the matter in hand. For a while there 
was a craze for putting the dates of the rec- 
ords late: the farther they could push them 
into the second century the happier a certain 
type of mind, noticeably those of Teutonic 
descent, seemed to be. Some, indeed, went 
farther still, if all tales be true, and hinted that 
the story of Jesus was an invention of priests, 
and that Jesus was a myth. Remarkable 
priests they must have been, to be such scamps 
and to be able to invent such loveliness: and 
still more remarkable people, who listened to 
such nonsense. Archbishop Whately put a 
satisfactory fool’s cap on them by writing a 
jeu desprit entitled “Historic Doubts Rela- 
tive to Napoleon Bonaparte,” in which he 
made out an excellent <ase for the legendary 
character of the Corsican. Napoleon, you 
would say, was historical enough, and to dis- 
prove him would tax the capacities of an 
archbishop himself: but even he, so near our 
own time, does not stand out, in any biog- 
raphy I have read, so vividly, so genuinely, 
so convincingly a person as does Jesus from 
the pages of the matchless records made 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 63 


by simple men so long ago. This fact alone 
would make us inclined to be suspicious of 
over-radical views: but, when it is backed 
by the researches of sane scholars, our minds 
may reasonably be at rest. In a following 
chapter we shall glance at some of the processes 
by which the records came into being, remind- 
ing ourselves that there must have been 
“sources” at the command of the evangelists, 
as, indeed, Luke clearly indicates. Meantime, 
it is enough to say that the work of the critics 
has had the effect of dating the Synoptics be- 
tween sixty A.D. and eighty A.D., and of se- 
curing their traditional authorship. That is 
to say, critical scholarship has been defensive 
against the ravages of critics: a reverent search 
for truth has returned to us the historical por- 
trait of Jesus, on which doubts had been cast: 
so that it becomes a matter for amazement that 
any one who cares for the historicity of the 
Founder of our Faith, should throw stones at 
our professors. ‘The attacks on our colleges, 
made by some F'undamentalists, are made in 
sheer ignorance: and the best that we can say 
of them, speaking the truth in love, is that 


64 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


their zeal for God is not according to know]l- 
edge. 

We turn, then, to the records as we turn to 
any other well authenticated historical ac- 
counts: the more we study them, the more the 
fact already referred to strikes us—that the 
picture of Jesus in the Gospels is the most liv- 
ing portrait we know. It is so harmonious, 
and yet so unstudied: so effortlessly propor- 
tionate; so natural, though so far beyond na- 
ture; that, as we read, we seem to hear His 
voice and see His tears. That such an effect 
should be produced by such men and by such 
means is nothing less than marvellous. If 
an ordinary writer endeavours to convey to 
us a personality in whom he is interested, he 
spends much time and elaboration in descrip- 
tion and analysis. Even if he has the genius 
to let the character unfold itself in its own 
speech and in incident, he endeavours to paint 
the lily and adorn the rose by passages writ- 
ten from his own point of view, dissecting the 
personality and describing its form and fea- 
ture. But there is nothing of this sort in the 
Gospels. A truly remarkable fact is that there 
is not a single line descriptive of the personal 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 65 


appearance of the Lord. No man knows what 
Jesus looked like. For such guesses as artists 
make they are dependent on a thin tradition 
handed down by artists themselves from early 
portraits. Some, indeed, hold that the Christ 
Face in art has behind it some vague resem- 
blance to that one Face, that smiled on little 
children: but they get no support from the 
Gospels. Nor is there any passage of that 
kind of dreary analysis of character, which 
makes so many biographies at once burden- 
some and wrong. On the contrary, all that 
the evangelists do is to relate what Jesus did 
to a man or said to a woman, with an artless- 
ness which conceals no art and yet is more 
effective than any art: and out of the record 
steps a Person vital, arresting, convincing, 
true. And when we reflect on the capacity of 
the writers, the wonder grows no less. Luke, 
it is true, was an educated man, and like other 
members of his noble profession had a happy 
eye for the lovely in deed and a quick ear for 
the delicate in phrase. But there is no reason 
for thinking him a past-master in literature: 
and as for the other two, they were very or- 
dinary, uneducated mortals. And yet, they 


66 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


gave us the Jesus of history, by doing nothing 
other than recording the history of Jesus. The 
records live because He was alive, and in them 
speaks for himself. The marvel of it all be- 
comes more vivid when we compare the reality 
of His portraiture with the unreality of other 
attempts to convey historical figures. Quite 
recently, a very clever man has endeavoured to 
renew for us the figure of Joan of Arc: and 
in that attempt Mr. G. B. Shaw deserves all 
the praise he has won. And yet it is a fail- 
ure: the Maid of France does not live for us 
in that voice-hearing tomboy. The only 
scene that (to my mind) carries conviction is 
the scene between the French Bishops and the 
English Earl, when they put their political 
cards on the table, and, for opposing reasons, 
decide to murder Joan. But all the gifts of 
Mr. Shaw cannot capture the unearthly figure 
of the Maid: easily, she breaks through his 
language and escapes. How then did those 
unlettered men of long ago manage to give to 
the world that other? The records of Jesus are 
all but as marvellous as Himself: or rather, 
they are marvellous because they allow Him to 
be Himself, in word and deed. And for that 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 67 


they stand alone, demanding men’s reverent 
assent, as to the written Word of God. 

We are all agreed that the Lord Jesus is 
the object of our faith, and that, therefore, the 
only records we possess of His life and words 
are of supreme importance. Everything 
about them is of significance; and, in par- 
ticular, it is a desirable thing to know a 
little about the way in which they came into 
being and about the materials which the evan- 
gelists possessed when they set themselves to 
the arresting task of writing the greatest biog- 
raphy in the world. Knowledge of origin is 
always interesting and often useful; and, while 
the explanation of how a thing came to be is 
not an explanation of the thing itself, a per- 
ception of the genesis of such books as the 
Bible contains frequently lightens our difficul- 
ties of interpretation and shows how we may 
accept its authority as a whole, without being 
tied down to each and all of its parts. If we 
can discern various sources and can point out 
that one source is of a different order from an- 
other, we are thereby freed from the necessity 
of treating it in the same way, or of demand- 
ing from it the same “quality” of truth. Just 


68 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


in the same way as we have been distinguishing 
between the “universes of discourse” in which 
different types of writing in the Old Testa- 
ment are true, so we may, by a knowledge of 
origins, distinguish between different parts of 
the New Testament, and find such difficulties 
as those created by the story of the Gadarene 
swine, for instance, considerably eased. But 
apart from that, anything about the Gospels 
ought to be interesting, Just because they are 
the written Christ. We cannot know too much 
about anything that is related to Him. 

It must have been an amazing experience 
to walk about the lanes and glens of Gal- 
ilee with Jesus Christ. In fact, it seems al- 
most incredible that there were many men and 
women who actually did it. The imagination 
of Christendom has played so long and, on 
the whole, so nobly on the thought of Him, 
that He has come to live for us in a beyond- 
world, set apart from earth. One of our ar- 
ticles of belief that we hold least vividly is that 
He was made in fashion as a man. It may 
be true that, in the circles outside the ranks of 
Christian belief, the doctrine of His divinity 
seems incredible; but, within the Church, it 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 69 


is more true to say that it is His humanity that 
has become most attenuated. Christian peo- 
ple, perhaps from reverence, have tended to 
push Him farther and farther away from the 
common life and experience of men, until they 
were in danger of creating a “docetic” Christ 
—a Christ whose body was mere appearance, 
a ghost-body enshrouding God. That danger 
is by no means allayed yet. Continually ut- 
terances may be heard and writings read which 
give us a Christ who has no connection with the 
Jesus of history, and is a reversion to ancient 
heresies. It is strange how easily, through anx- 
iety for orthodoxy, men may become hetero- 
dox. I have myself heard an eloquent funda- 
mentalist earnestly upholding something very 
like the Apollinarian heresy, and believing that 
in so doing he was defending the divinity of 
Christ against modernists. How little he 
knew that the attempt to unify the Person of 
Christ at'the expense of His human nature had 
been made in the fourth century, and that one 
of its chief opponents had been that doughty 
defender of the faith, St. Athanasius. We 
can never be sound in doctrine unless we hold 
to the true humanity of Jesus. The main 


70 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


problem for theology is to relate that fact to 
divinity; and it clearly can never succeed in 
so doing by explaining the humanity away. 

So Jesus lived in fashion as a man and dwelt 
among us. ‘There were those that saw Him 
plain, that caught the tones of His voice when 
He talked of an erring son and a kind-hearted 
Samaritan, that smiled back in answer to His 
smile, that watched His falling tears. And 
in the gloaming, many a time, they sat with 
Him on the edge of the corn-field, while in 
murmuring cadences and low, He spoke of 
God and goodness. When we imagine it 
through the mist of centuries—a mist made 
golden by His love—it seems an experience 
too great for mortal men to bear. Of one 
thing we may be certain, it burned deep into 
their memories. His personality gripped and 
engrossed them; His influence dominated and 
permeated their minds; the loveliness of Him- 
self and of His words possessed them. And 
then there came the tragic days, when despair 
settled on the hearts of His friends. How 
they had loved Him; how they had hoped; 
how they had trusted! And now all was gone; 
their dream had fallen “sheer, a blinded thing”; 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 71 


for He who, they had hoped, would have de- 
livered Israel, was crucified, dead and buried. 
But suddenly “the dawn came up like thun- 
der’; they knew in the hearts of them that 
their Lord was alive and that all the power and 
care and love on which they had leaned were 
there for their sustaining yet. 

And what happened? Why this, at least: 
they talked about Him. ‘They talked about 
little else. If you could have come upon 
a little company of His followers in Jerusalem 
or Antioch, standing at a street corner, the 
words you would have heard most frequently 
would have been, “Don’t you remember?” 
Each one would be eager to add to the stock of 
gracious memory; each one would have some- 
thing particular and personal to contribute; 
all would be drinking in the reminiscences of 
each, and repeating them at night at the sup- 
per-table and next day at the market. And 
thus the knowledge of Him and of His say- 
ings spread and developed, until the time came 
for some one to suggest that they ought to 
be put in writing for future generations. 

It is sometimes helpful to make contempo- 
rary an experience like that. Nothing is un- 


72 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


seemly that makes so great a happening vivid. 
Suppose, then, that Jesus had lived in ‘Toronto 
instead of in Jerusalem, and last year instead 
of 1,900 years ago. And supposing that we, 
who now claim that His love has touched our 
hearts a little, had been amongst the company 
of people who had heard Him gladly. What 
would we be doing to-day? Why, we should 
be standing at the corner of Yonge and King, 
perhaps, with a friend, and one would say to 
the other: “Do you remember what He said 
about the lost coin?” And the other would 
reply: “No, I wasn’t there that day. What 
was it?” And we should tell him, and his face 
would light up at its beauty and he would 
register a vow to tell his family about it that 
night when he got home. Round the table that 
evening, after he had recounted it, his wife 
would sit silent for a little, and then softly tell 
how she had met a woman that day who had 
once touched Him, and found all her life 
changed. And similar occurrences would be 
taking place in other houses in the city, and 
in little towns up in the Muskokas—the lake- 
country—in which He had lived and worked; 
memory aiding memory, until each had given 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST "3 


his contribution to the common store, until it 
in its completeness became a common posses- 
sion. 

And, then, unquestionably, we should begin 
to commit to writing our oral tradition; as did 
the people of Jesus’ time, beginning, not un- 
naturally, with His sayings. How many peo- 
ple attempted the task we do not know, but 
there must have been a considerable number to 
justify Luke’s statement that “many have 
taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- 
tion of those things most surely believed 
among us’; and clearly, also, these attempts 
had been made before Luke took pen in hand. 
It is difficult to understand why the work of 
these gospellers has been permitted to be lost, 
but no doubt we have the better part of them 
incorporated in the records in our Bible. For, 
doubtless, our evangelists used them. None 
of them was with Jesus all the time, and the 
best of them would not trust his own memory 
alone. So in the Synoptics we may believe 
that we have the careful consummation of the 
earlier attempts to give the world, by the 
written word, the knowledge of the Perfect 
Life. First, there would come a record of 


44 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


His sayings, then the early, fragmentary Gos- 
pels to which Luke refers; then Mark, Mat- 
thew and Luke, in that order, and finally, later 
and in a different category, the great, com- 
manding Gospel of St. John, 

Now, this rough, impressionist outline of 
the way in which the Gospels came into being 
makes them a more wonderful creation than 
if we regard them as the outcome of some 
sort of magical, automatic writing. It is the 
lack of magic that causes the wonder. Work- 
ing like normal, honest historians, these men, 
two of whom were unlettered, succeeded in 
producing this inspired portrait—so inspired 
that it has turned the world upside down. 
Far from belittling the Bible, this thought of 
origin and sources to my mind exalts it. It 
is when the amazing emerges through the or- 
dinary that it becomes amazing; and, more- 
over, it is when we can believe that we are read- 
ing the normal history of Jesus that we can 
be confident that we are in touch with the 
Jesus of history. Once again, we have reason 
to be grateful to the patient scholars, whom 
ignorance alone abuses, who have discovered 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST 75 


the simple, human means by which the miracle 
of the Bible has come to be. 

But, it may be, a question will arise in some 
minds as to how far we can depend on the ac- 
curacy of records transmitted at first orally 
and then, by gradual accumulation, put in 
writing. Everything depends, first, upon the 
accuracy of the oral tradition, and second, on 
the evangelists’ power of selection. In regard 
to the former it is worth while emphasizing the 
exercise of memory which the peoples of the 
East have always indulged in, and on which 
they were, at that time, all but dependent alike 
for their entertainment and for their dissem- 
ination of knowledge, amongst the classes to 
whom we owe the story of Jesus. Few of 
them could read or write; but long stories were 
doubtless told them and repeated by them one 
to the other, and thus their verbal memories, 
which of all faculties grows by use, would be 
strongly retentive. In particular, they would 
be accurate in reporting sayings, for their 
minds must have had some of the powers of 
children. We all know how a child will not 
permit the slightest alteration in the phrase- 
ology of some familiar nursery story, and it 


%6 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


may well be that that gift of the child-lke 
mind has played its part in preserving for us 
the authentic words of the Friend of little 
children. At any rate, the correspondence and 
the consistency of the sayings of Jesus in the 
synoptics are sufficient alone to secure us in 
our belief that in them we have a dependable 
compendium of the teachings on which so much 
depend. 

The second condition—the fact that the 
evangelists had to select from what may have 
been a considerable mass of material—pos- 
sibly helps us when we come to the passages 
which are inherently difficult of acceptance. It 
is impossible to think of the passage of such 
a power as Jesus through the world without 
imagining that all manner of apocryphal sto- 
ries would gather round His name. In fact, 
we know that they did. In the Gospel of the 
Infancy, for instance, there are records of the 
boyhood of Jesus, which represent Him as do- 
ing purely magical and self-centred things— 
such as clapping His hands after He had made 
some clay-pigeons, so that they flew, and even 
on one occasion, striking dead by a word a boy 
who had annoyed Him. Amongst an Kastern 


THE BIBLE AS THE WRITTEN CHRIST ‘(7 


people, used to stories of magic and black art, 
it was inevitable that such anecdotes should 
attach themselves to a personality so potent, 
and the marvel is that more of them did not 
creep into the Gospels. There is a class of 
“miracles” which are purely thaumaturgic, 1.e., 
they serve no moral or helpful end, but are 
marvels pure and simple, and we should ex- 
pect to find many examples of wonder-deeds 
of that sort attributed to Jesus. As I say, it 
is amazing that we do not; and if any story of 
that sort has crept in—such as the story of the 
swine or the withered fig tree—it only sets 
forth all the more the spiritual selective power 
of the evangelists. They must have been truly 
inspired to have avoided cramming the Gospels 
from end to end with the apocryphal. And let 
none be kept back from adherence to the au- 
thority of Jesus, because, possibly, we have 
one or two records of what people only imag- 
ined Him to have done. 

For in these records we have a harmonious, 
consistent agreement on the personality of the 
Lord; on His revelation of God’s love for man, 
active and redeeming, and on His teaching as 
to what man should be and how he should be it. 


78 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


And through it all, He Himself moves, dom- 
inating and alive, He came; He lived; He died 
for men. He showed us man at his height, 
and when we think of God we can think of 
nothing more worship-worthy than the God in 
Christ. Take Him away—and let the night 
envelop us! Ah! but He is there in history, 
and He is here by our side, and, if we will let 
Him, in our hearts. Wherefore, pore over 
that Life and Death; commune with Him 
anew in the Word; and rest ye in the Lord. 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF 
FAITH AND PRACTICE 


NE of the results of the scholarly study 

of the Scriptures has been to raise afresh 

the question of the relation in which they stand 
to the Church. Is the Bible now the final au- 
thority for the Church’s doctrine: and, if so, 
in what sense? —The Reformers, of course, had 
no doubt on the matter. The Westminster 
Confession is entirely explicit, for, after enu- 
merating the separate books, it says, “all of 
which are given by inspiration of God to be 
the rule of faith and life.” No other external 
authority is considered at all: the Roman view 
of the authority of the Church is excluded: 
and the Bible is enthroned as the one regulator 
to which churches are to appeal, for “the infal- 
lible rule of the interpretation of Scripture is 
the Scripture itself.” Inasmuch as the Con- 
fession also holds to the verbal inspiration and 
accuracy of the original text in Hebrew and 
Greek (cf. Chap. 1, v. 8), and seeing that 

79 


80 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


scholarship has proved that in many cases the 
text has become confused in copying, clearly 
a question of great importance has arisen, and 
we must, somewhat anxiously, enquire as to 
the position which the Bible occupies as the 
authority for the Church’s thought to-day. 

In answer thereto, we cannot do better than 
quote the article on Revelation in the doctrinal 
basis of our United Church. In that docu- 
ment, it may be noted, the article on Scripture 
stands second, with the article on God stand- 
ing first; while in the Westminster Confession 
the order is reversed. ‘The change is nothing 
but an improvement and right. Man real- 
ized the existence of God before the Scrip- 
tures were written. Nowhere in the Bible is 
there an attempt to prove God: the Most High 
is the great assumption lying behind the Scrip- 
tures, and the witness to Him lies deep in the 
spirit of man. It is, according to the Psalm- 
ist, only the fool who says in his heart that 
there is no God. Consequently, our articles 
are true to Scripture in putting the doctrine 
of God before the doctrine of revelation; while 
the Westminster divines had permitted their 
hatred of Rome and its authoritative claims to 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 81 


cloud their judgment, and put the Book be- 
fore its Lord. It is in little things that we 
often may best judge progress: and in this 
little alteration of order of precedence we can, 
I think, discern a genuine development in 
right theological thinking. 

The article in our basis upon this matter 
I shall quote in full. It may be of interest 
beyond our own borders; and it certainly 
ought to be of interest within them. Is it too 
much to hope that our membership will make 
itself familiar with the basal doctrinal state- 
ment of our own Church? We ought to 
know what our Church stands for in the mat- 
ter of doctrine, which is the unfolding of that 
which we hold to be implicit in our religious 
faith. The more our document is studied the 
more any fears that our Church stands for an 
ultra-liberal position will be dissipated. It 
is, as a matter of fact, a thoroughly conserva- 
tive statement. I remember the surprise dis- 
played once by a prominent Fundamentalist 
when I quoted to him some of its passages— 
particularly Article 3, on the Divine purpose 
—and his expression of satisfaction therewith. 
The basis as a whole is far more conservative 


82 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


than a confession of faith drawn up by, say, 
the late Principal Denney would have been: 
and if any criticism is to be levelled at it, it is 
on the ground that it leans overmuch to the 
past. However, it is our written statement of 
the implications of our faith, and in the matter 
of Revelation it is clear and explicit. 

“We believe that God has revealed Himself. 
in nature, in history and in the heart of man; 
that He has been graciously pleased to make 
clearer revelation of Himself to men of God 
who spoke as they were moved by His spirit; 
and that in the fulness of time He has per- 
fectly revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, the 
Word made flesh, who is the brightness of the 
Father’s glory and the express image of His 
person. We receive the Holy Scriptures of 
the Old and New Testaments, given by in- 
spiration of God, as containing the only in- 
fallible rule of faith and life, a faithful rec- 
ord of God’s gracious revelations, and as the 
sure witness to Christ.” 

To that statement most of us will give 
hearty assent. Certainly this book is written 
in accord with its spirit and_ its letter. 
For in it is suggested the progressive and 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 83 


developing revelation of God, and its cul- 
mination in Jesus Christ, with the supreme 
authority given to Him. There are, however, 
two words in it which need to be specially 
noted—one of which may occasion dispute, 
while the other, if taken away from its tech- 
nical sense, may give rise to mistake. These 
words are “containing” and “rule.”’ Accord- 
ing to us, the Bible contains a rule of faith 
and life; and both the emphasized words are 
important for a proper understanding of our 
position. 

If the Bible is primarily regarded as a rule 
of faith and life, it is clear at onee that the 
word “containing” must be retained and 
made emphatic. For a great deal of the 
Bible has nothing to do with faith and life— 
or, if there be some connection, it is deriva- 
tive and remote. For instance, the detailed 
measurements of the Tabernacle, the genea- 
logical tables in Chronicles, the records of such 
primitive social arrangements as the compul- 
sory marriage of a deceased brother’s wife, or 
the meticulous instructions for ceremonial 
washing, have nothing to do with the faith 
or practice of people living in Canada to-day. 


84 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


Those parts of the Bible to which we can ap- 
peal must be distinguished from those parts 
to which only Hebrews of long ago could ap- 
peal: history must be separated from the state- 
ment of that which has no history because it 
is eternal: records of thoughts and practices, 
which have passed away, must be set apart 
from perceptions of the divine will which are 
for all time, in order that we may discover 
the authoritative rule for us, and, the moment 
these facts are perceived, the word “contain- 
ing” becomes inevitable. It is a blessing that 
at last it is firmly set in the doctrinal state- 
ment of our Church, and that we are escaped 
from a view of Scripture which seemed to put 
tables of measurement and the Sermon on the 
Mount on the same level. 

The second emphasized word, “rule” of faith 
and life, is a technical theological term and 
must always be understood in its technical 
sense. It comes from a Latin word which 
originally signified a piece of straight stick or 
a ruler, and that, in turn, is connected with 
a verb meaning “to guide.” A rule is a “reg- 
ulator.” It is not a set of rules, or of by-laws, 
or of regulations, such as those by which traf- 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 85 


fic is controlled in New York, or decent be- 
havior is secured in public parks in Toronto. 
It is an external authority to which appeal 
can be made in difficulty or doubt or dark- 
ness. It is as the Psalmist says, a “lamp unto 
our feet’’: it shows the path immediately be- 
fore us, and then tells us to adventure out 
into the rocky darkness and so find our way 
home. And, we claim, it is the only external 
regulator or guide that the Church has or can 
ever need. When mind and conscience are 
dim, when heart and spirit fail, we are to go 
to the Bible and to the Bible only, and, with 
its guidance, follow on to know the Lord. 
What, then, are we to do with writings to 
which we stand in such a relation as that? 
Well, in the first place, clearly, we must 
read them, in order to discern their guidance 
for our faith and life to-day. And we must 
seek their counsel as a consistent whole, re- 
membering the fact of their development, and 
not allowing Scripture to cloud Scripture. 
To confute the teaching of Jesus on the Chris- 
tian duty of loving our enemies by a quota- 
tion from the cursing Psalms is an obvious 
mishandling of the Word, and yet it is remark- 


86 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


able how often verses of Scripture are used in 
that way, without reference to their setting or 
occasion, or the larger teaching of the Great 
Authority. To use a Scotticism, we must be 
on our guard against “snippit” quotations, if 
we are to use the Bible as our regulator. The 
proof-texts appended to the various articles 
in the Westminster Confession afford some 
rather pathetic examples of the manner in 
which Scripture may be compelled, against 
its will, to support a doctrine. The one secure 
plan for the proper use of Scripture is to en- 
throne Christ and His teachings, and to re- 
late all the rest to Him. When we do that, 
we shall find, perhaps to our surprise, how 
wide are our resources and how rich is our 
guidance in this inspired library, while, at the 
same time, we are set free from the difficulties 
created by contradictions, or by the ethical 
views of a harsher and more cruel day, before 
the Sun of Righteousness arose. 

To take the Bible as our rule means, then, 
two things—first that we subjugate its author- 
ity to the authority of Christ, and, second, that 
we do that through the enlightenment of the 
Holy Spirit. Now, the latter of these two is 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 87% 


singularly important. It has never been held 
by us or our ancestors that the Bible is per se 
the Word of God for us. It is the word illu- 
minated by the Holy Spirit that becomes the 
vital regulator of faith and life, either for a 
Church or a man. The Westminster divines 
were quite alive to that, and left no doubt 
about it in their historic document. To give 
their own words, they say: “Our full persua- 
sion and assurance of the infallible truth, and 
divine authority thereof, is from the inward 
work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by . 
and with the Word in our hearts.” Or again, 
“nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illu- 
mination of the Spirit of God to be necessary 
for the saving understanding of such things 
as are revealed in the Word.” Or yet again, 
“the supreme Judge, by which all controver- 
sies of religion are to be determined .. . can 
be none other but the Holy Spirit speaking in 
the Scripture.” These men, manifestly, were 
far above and beyond the poor mechanical view 
of the Bible, which has sometimes been pre- 
sented as theirs, and which, apparently, some 
misguided people are anxious to foist on the 
evangelical world again. According to their 


88 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


strong and understanding teaching, a man or 
a church must come reverently to the Scrip- 
tures, and when the page is illuminated by the 
Spirit that is indwelling in their minds, so 
that its truth stands out convincingly and 
clear, then the Word of God is before them to 
guide them and set them free. And thus it is 
that we claim support for the view of the Bible 
which we maintain to-day. For the Spirit of 
God is the Spirit of Truth; and all that rev- 
erent scholars, by patient study, have learned 
of the Scriptures is, if it be true, of the Spirit. 
And the conviction that has come to us that 
the whole Bible must be referred to Christ 
and subjugated to Him, is surely of the Spirit. 
Wherefore, in reverent dependence on God’s 
help, and in steady unflagging love of truth, 
study the Bible and teach it as a God-aided 
mind and conscience perceive it to be true, and 
be not afraid. 

But one word of warning is necessary. We 
must not confuse what we would like to be 
true with what is true. A man may very 
easily make his own preferences, or preju- 
dices, or hopes, the discerners of the truth of 
Scripture. He may mistake the voice of his 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 89 


own heart for the voice of the Spirit of God— 
and the end of that way is confusion and 
thick darkness. I think it is probably fear 
—a not unreasonable fear—of some such hap- 
pening as that, that makes the Fundamen- 
talist so suspicious of the discovery of dif- 
ferent values in the Bible. It all springs 
from the frailties of the human heart, he says: 
far better to take the Bible as it stands, from 
cover to cover. Indeed, he is pointing to 
a real danger, and a man who is prepared 
to take the Bible as his rule must prepare 
himself to be entirely candid. He must ac- 
cept its teaching, when he uncomfortably 
feels in the bones of him that it is true, al- 
though it clashes with what he, as a timorous 
and sinful human being, would like to be true. 
Take the great instance—take the teaching of 
Scripture on moral destiny. Every one of us 
would like to be a Universalist, and to be able 
to preach that at the last the whole universe 
must be filled with the spirit of perfect love, 
and that all rebellion and its dire results shall 
disappear before the all-embracing conquest 
of the Saviour. But, while such a hope may 
indicate our minds, it is plain fact that the 


90 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


Bible does not teach the necessity or inevi- 
tability of complete final restoration. Indeed, 
it could not teach it, along with its doctrine of 
the invincible freedom of personality. It is 
alleged that Mr. Chesterton, in the course of 
a discussion on retribution, once cried, “I in- 
sist on my right to be damned,” and, thereby, 
he struck the nail fairly on the head. So long 
as a man is a person and free, his ultimate des- 
tiny is dependent on his own choice. And 
what if he chooses ill? ‘Thus, in Scripture, 
which is so faithful to the facts of human na- 
ture, the grim possibilities are not shrouded. 
Doses of spiritual opium are not given. We 
are left face to face with the final sombreness, 
that, until we arise and go unto our Father, 
we cannot dwell in His home. Our Lord 
Himself emphasizes the gravity of immediate 
and present decision, when, with deep urgency, 
He calls out the one word “strive.” And if 
we, through sentimentality, turn our heads 
from that recurrent gravity, and, in studying 
Scripture, will not face the whole of it, we are 
refusing to allow the spirit to illumine it for 
our understanding. 

But if we get a Church which, willing to 


THE BIBLE AS THE RULE OF FAITH 91 


learn, with brave candor searches the Scrip- 
tures, corrects its conscience by their standard, 
and refers back to them in perplexity and 
doubt, then we have a Church which will never 
go wrong. At least, as individual men and 
women, let us so use the Word. For we need 
guidance so sorely. Life is so pitiable and so 
hard, our eyes are so dim, our understanding 
is so clouded by our sin. We need the Word. 
Let us read and mark it well, and, being ruled 
thereby, be led into peace. 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 


NY ONE who has been reading some re- 
cent books on things Biblical and cog- 

nate matters will have noticed that one of the 
most frequent adjectives used in them is 
“new,” with “modern” running hard for the 
second place. New views and new angles 
jostle modern attitudes and modern ap- 
proaches—although some of them are rather 
more hoary and less modern than they give 
themselves out to be. But the total effect on 
the mind is to create a thirst for something 
that is satisfactorily ancient; for, after all, the 
best things are those which have stood the test 
of time. And we can find what we want, sure- 
ly, when we come to speak of the use of the 
Bible. At any rate, I have nothing new to 
advise, and no “modern” recommendation to 
make. People have been reading the Bible 
for quite a while, and have learned much that 
is valuable about its use. Criticism does not 


alter the Bible’s position as our one external 
92 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 93 


authority, nor does it dull the voice of God 
sounding in it. It may help us to avoid the 
pernicious habit of taking the Scriptures in 
“snippets”: although I doubt (despite proof- 
texts appended to the Confession) if that was 
ever a very prevalent habit. The Bible remains 
what it has always been, the great devotional 
library of Christendom; and the best thing 
we can do is to get back to some of the prac- 
tices of more devotional ages than our own, 
and by becoming less “modern” become more 
wise. 

And, first, let us reflect on this pearl of | 
wisdom: the best way to use the Bible is to 
use it. ‘There can be no question that we 
have weakened here on the habits of our 
fathers. We have allowed ourselves to become 
the sport and plaything of the “towniness of 
towns,’ of a smattering of education, of the 
cheap printing-press, and of electricity. When 
everybody can read and imagines he can think; 
when the telegraph brings the snappiest news 
of the wide, wide world daily to newspaper 
offices, and thence, in big headlines, to the 
breakfast table; when a man can feast on a 
crisis in the Balkans and a murder in Chicago 


94. MODERNIST. FUNDAMENTALISM 


in the intervals of following the mournful 
home-life of Jiggs and Maggie, or the devel- 
opment of Casper’s infant; and when he 
is a bundle of restless nerves at the end of a 
day spent largely at the telephone, he is not 
in the frame of mind to move into regions that 
call for the quiet heart and the meditative 
mind. It is facts like these that make us ques- 
tion progress. God must be very sorry for 
city-dwellers, and probably excuses them 
much. I remember Dr. G. H. Morrison once 
saying that the wisest type of man he had 
known was a shepherd. He was not so adapt- 
able mentally as a city-dweller, nor so alert: 
but he had brooded long and silently, amidst 
great spaces, on themes of permanent import, 
and his judgment on moral issues was far 
deeper and surer. What we need to do is to 
combine the excellences of the former and 
the latter days; and I think that in the forma- 
tion and increase of study-circles we see an 
encouraging sign that our young people are 
endeavouring so to do. It would be a defi- 
nitely retrograde step if the next generation 
became a people of one book; but it would be 
worse if they became a people of every book 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 95 


except one, and that the Bible. Consequently, 
a purpose of intelligent Bible-reading should 
be undertaken by all of us. It will require 
effort, determination and self-discipline; but 
it is essential if we desire to advance on the 
generations that were before us. An age that 
reads the Scripture by an oil lamp is higher 
in the scale of civilization than an age which 
only reads the press head-lines by electric 
hight. Our business is to harness the discov- 
eries of applied science to the car of noble 
learning; and so have in our treasure-house 
things both new and old. | 

Now there are three ways in which we can 
read the Bible. We can read it as literature. 
We can read it as the subject of detailed study. 
And we can read it devotionally. As far as — 
in us lies we should endeavour to use all three 
avenues of approach. 

Inasmuch as the Bible is literature—and 
great literature—we should treat it as such. 
No doubt this is the least important way in 
which to regard Scripture; but it should not 
be overlooked. When we are reading the 
works of some secular writer, we do not 
insist on reading only fragments of that 


96 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


which he meant to be a unity. A play of 
Shakespeare, for instance, needs to be read 
through to be properly appreciated. In the 
same way, the Biblical Library consists of 
books which, for the most part, are unities and 
should be read through at a sitting. That es- 
pecially applies to the writings of St. Paul. 
The man, who wants to get a grip of the se- 
quence and coherence of the Apostle’s mes- 
sage, will sometimes sit down to read his 
epistles as if they were what they are, namely, 
letters written to friends in the ordinary 
course of his pastoral correspondence. Simi- 
larly a man should deal with a prophet, al- 
though the ‘prophetic writings are not unified 
in the same way. Especially, it is valuable to 
read through such a straight story as the Gos- 
pel of St. Mark. After all, these books are 
books; they deal with the most entrancing 
story in the world; why should we not pay 
them the compliment of ae them through 
at a sitting? 

If we do, using the while our imagination to 
get the viewpoint of the writer, two results 
will follow. First and quickly, we shall come 
to love and to know a little noble English. 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 97 


The well of English undefiled is the authorized 
version. The purest and simplest orator Brit- 
ain ever had, John Bright, is said scarcely to 
have used a word that is not to be found with- 
in the Bible pages; and, if only this by-prod- 
uct of Biblical reading were gained, we should 
not have read in vain. The English language 
is at present in real danger of losing its beauty 
and its clarity. The speech of public men 
tends to become slovenly and unlovely; and 
a generation that returned to the simplicity 
and grace of Biblical English, in its oratory 
and in its writing, would deserve well of pos- 
terity. Second, we shall be taken into regions 
of Scripture, which we commonly neglect. The 
Bible is like the continent of North America; 
parts of it are “crowded” and familiar, while 
others are hardly ever touched. But there are 
great beauties in the unknown places. 

For this method of Bible reading two aids 
are necessary. First, a modern translation, 
and second, a simple introduction to the book 
which is bemg read through—of which there 
are many amongst the “aids for Bible stu- 
dents.” ‘The former suggestion would seem, 
by the way, to contradict the emphasis just 


98 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


laid upon the authorized version as the stand- 
ard for style; but the contradiction is only 
apparent. In the authorized version there 
are inevitably certain archaisms which make 
understanding difficult; and its very familiar- 
ity makes it ineffective occasionally in getting 
into the quick of the mind. Consequently, 
translations like those of Prof. Moffatt or 
Prof. Goodspeed are valuable as comment- 
aries, which either bring the meaning quickly 
out of an archaic word or turn of speech, or 
direct the mind to a meaning which has be- 
come blurred. But let me make a humble 
protest against the tendency to use these, or 
any other modern translations, in public wor- 
ship. I am certain that these distinguished. 
authors never dreamed of them being so‘used. 
To hear, say 1 Corinthians 18, given out in 
church, and then not to hear the noble words 
in which the loveliness of the hymn of love has 
been conveyed to so many generations, makes 
me feel like murder. We welcome gratefully 
all such translations as aids to Bible study; 
but if they ‘are‘to be foisted on us for use in 
public devotion, I should like to see a law 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 99 


passed that any one who ever translates the 
Bible again shall be shot at sight! 

In the second place, we should come to the 
Bible as to a library requiring serious study 
—in the same way that we approach a text- 
book in our craft or profession to study 
it. For this, three assistances are desirable— © 
a commentary, such as those mentioned above; 
a Bible class, which you will attend and go 
on attending; and a good, strong power of 
determination, for some of the study will be 
dull. The ideal, and it is quite attainable, 
would be for us all to make up our minds to 
master one book a year, so that at the end 
of the year we shall know about the life and 
times of its author, the circumstances which 
caused him to write, the sequence and develop- 
ment of his argument and message and the 
problems which his book creates as well as 
explains. If ever we study a book in that 
way, we shall assuredly find it to become liv- 
ing and amazingly interesting; for the study 
of the Scriptures always creates a delight in 
them. The Bible is a dull book only to those 
who will not look beneath its surface. Some 


100 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


of the process of digging may be wearisome, 
but the result is true pleasure. 

Now, study of the Bible in this way depends 
on Bible classes, and Bible classes depend on 
the people. Do not go blaming your minister. 
Nothing will give him greater satisfaction 
than to find a deputation from his young peo- 
ple asking him to give up social evenings in 
favour of a.study of the Epistle to the Philip- 
pians, or, preferably, to keep the social evening 
and add the study. If such requests came all 
over the land there would be such cheery 
Christmases in our manses as have never 
been known. And, after all, why should they 
not? Weare at a supreme moment in the his- 
tory of the Christian Church—a moment when 
we may expect the unexpected. We are all 
anxious to serve, we cannot serve better than 
by informing ourselves about God’s Word, 
and thus creating the atmosphere in which 
others will be anxious to be informed. That 
eccentric genius, the poet-artist, Wulham 
Blake, once justly observed: “Let every 
Christian, as much as in him lies, engage him- 
self openly and publicly, before all the world, 
in some mental pursuit for the building up of 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 101 


Jerusalem.” We cannot build Jerusalem un- 
less we engage in what the same poet calls 
“mental fight”; and there is no mental fight 
more profitable than wrestling for an under- 
standing of the Scriptures. 

And third, and chiefly, we must use the’ » 
Bible devotionally; through it we must prac-: 
tise the presence of God. For it is thus 
that the Bible is a direct means of grace and 
becomes for us the word of Life. Upon that, 
there is little to be said. Its devotional pur- 
pose is so clear; its assistance in the regions 
eternal is so manifest; the voice of God in 
its pages is so insistent, that no man can deny 
that he may use it devotionally, if only he will. 
Wise and simple, learned and unlearned, meet 
there on common ground; wayfaring men 
shall not err if they seek God in His Word. 
In this busy—as some of us may think, this 
over-busy—world, some people have hardly 
the time for much study; but all have time, 
if they will make it, to spend a little space 
each morning reading a familiar verse and 
thinking over it. “If you have only three min- 
utes a day to give to Bible reading, spend one 
minute in reading and two in thinking over 


102 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


what you have read in God’s presence.” So 
wrote Principal Rainy to his son in India; 
and the advice is golden. As we read general- 
ly and at large in the Scriptures we should 
mark those passages which seem to have some- 
thing to do with our -own hearts and lives. 
Our marked passages become the Word of 
God for us; and these can be the passages 
which we can call to mind as each day begins 
or ends. A phrase from a verse will suffice. 
“The Lord is my shepherd’”—a man does not 
need to go farther into that sunny little “moth- 
er’s psalm” to have enough to think over be- 
fore he sets out to his daily task. And, if 
each day, he lets some such tender passage 
lead him into the presence of God, to stand 
there while reverently at gaze, slowly he will 
grow in power, slowly he will gain the peace 
which the world cannot give—nor take away. 
I give you the end of a golden string, 
Only wind it into a ball, 


It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, 
Built in Jerusalem’s wall. 


Ah! life is so sore a struggle. The enemies 
of our soul are so seldom left dead upon the 
field. Myself am so continually a traitor to 


THE USE OF THE BIBLE 103 


myself. We need, and we know we need, all 
the help we can discover. And here it is, 
ample to sustain, sufficient to guide, in the 
Word of God. If we neglect it we neglect 
it at our peril; but if we use it, it will be 
to us, as to the generations before us, a power 
unto salvation. 


THE FINAL AUTHORITY 


HE final authority for religious belief is 
the authority of personal experience. It 
is one thing to say, “I believe that Jesus can 
restore sight, because I have been told so by 
reliable witnesses’: but it is another to say 
“whereas I was blind, now I see.” That man, 
in the familiar story, had no dubiety as to the 
power of the Master, for the best of reasons. 
Wherefore, as we come to the conclusion of 
these brief studies, let us*consider for a mo- 
ment that ultimate ground of .confidence, 
which the Bible itself indicates to be ultimate. 
For, in the last instance, the Bible is of su- 
preme value because it is so potent a means 
whereby a man may learn for himself, in the 
experience of his own heart, the healing power 
of God. 
Now, religious experience is a very varied, 
subtle and spiritual thing; and about it we 
may, with painful facility, make mistakes. A 


man may possess it and never know that he 
104 





THE FINAL AUTHORITY 105 


possesses it: while, on the other hand, he may, 
and often does, mistake the effects of mob 
psychology for the real thing. The very name 
of it renders certain types of mind suspicious: 
and some of the best and most honest feel that 
it should scarcely be spoken of, for it dwells 
in the deeps of those hearts which reticent 
people do not wear on their sleeves. 
Nevertheless, the Scriptures are full of it. 
They continually point to it as the sine qua 
mon of confidence, and so necessarily in- 
wrought with the upward movement of the 
soul. “Ye must be born again:” “this is life 
eternal that they may know Thee, the only 
true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hath 
sent’’—there is no limit to the quotations which 
could be made, which presuppose an experi- 
ence of the most vital kind. And the life 
stories of the Gospels and Acts are no less 
emphatic: above all, there is the classic case of 
Paul; although here a word of warning is 
needed. ‘There has been a tendency to stand- 
ardize the conversion of Paul, as if religious 
experience could take no form but his. “There 
are as many religions as there are men,” some 
one has remarked, not untruly: certainly, re- 


106 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


ligious experience is an individual thing; and 
to say that we must all pass through a sudden, 
catastrophic change, like Paul, is to say that 
we are all made in his heroic mould. As a 
matter of fact, Paul was somewhat superior 
to the rest of us: and we are not to expect 
that we shall react to the sudden pressure of 
God on us precisely in the same way as that 
mighty captain in God’s armies. Still, in some 
form, a religious awakening or awareness 
seems to be assumed as possible for us all: it 
is implied in the Apostle’s prayer that we may 
be able to comprehend with all saints: and it 
is, therefore, our most serious business to en- 
quire whether, and to what extent, we can 
make the demand for it universal. 

In the first place, the fact hits us in the 
eye that if religious experience is the mark of 
all saints, it is the possession of singularly 
diverse people. Have you ever thought how 
remarkable are the specimens to whom the 
term “saint” is applied in the New Testament? 
There are, of course, the standard types. 
There is Abraham, the solitary friend of, and 
adventurer for, God: there is Enoch, who so 
habitually and natively practised God’s pres- 


THE FINAL AUTHORITY 107 


ence, that to pass to “the perfect vision of His 
face, which we, for want of words, call heaven,”’ 
scarce broke the even tenor of his way: there 1s 
David, at once sinner, penitent, warrior, poet 
and religious genius: there is Peter, unstable 
and impetuous, but golden in the deep heart 
of him: there is the Magdalene, life’s butter- 
fly, winning nobility through a. world of tears: 
and there is John, pure of heart and great of 
vision. But with these there are others. There 
is, for instance, J acob—as mean a scab as ever 
took advantage of an old man’s blindness and 
a brother’s trust; a man who needed a soul- 
inverting conversion before he could become a 
Prince in Israel. Above all, read again that 
queer list of parti-colored saints in Hebrews 
11:82 (who are bracketed, if you please, with 
Samuel and the prophets), Samson, Barak 
and Jephthah. Think of Samson, the sport 
and plaything of a minx, who only recovered 
his manhood when, in one wild effort, he 
brought death crashing down on himself as 
on his oppressors. Think of Jephthah, that 
cheerful and bloody-handed brigand, who 
would think nothing of slitting a throat or two 
before breakfast, entered into the roll of God’s 


108 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


honor, because he lived up to the good he knew, 
and having paid his vow unto the Lord, could 
not go back. They are a mixed bag, surely: 
but they are all engrossed in the noblest of 
lists, and are given right to the noblest of 
names, And the point for us to observe is that 
religious experience must be a something 
which can be shared by temperaments and per- 
sonalities as distinct and separate as_ these. 
The Johns and the Peters, the Samsons and 
the Jephthahs still exist. Each needs to tread 
his own path to come to God; but there must, 
surely, be something which they can all know 
and feel in common—some experience which 
appeals to the heart beneath the heart of each: 
and we have to ask ourselves if we can state 
that common denominator in Christian terms. 

Will any man deny that he sees for him- 
self the loveliness of Jesus Christ? We are 
not concerned for the moment, about theol- 
ogizings, but only with the impact of that 
shining life upon our minds. ‘The sunlight 
is gracious to eyes that know nothing about 
the solar system. It falls on the grass and 
gives sparkle as of gems to the dew; it displays 
the freshness of the morning and the sad 


ee ye 


THE FINAL AUTHORITY 109 


beauty of the evening, when the day withdraws 
slowly as if loath to lay her loveliness to rest; 
it gives us on a winter morning a symbol of 
the purity of heaven. Who does not love the 
sunlight? And who does not catch the beauty 
of the Dayspring from on high, when He 
visits us? Who does not discern the excel- 
lence of Jesus? Well, that is religious ex- 
perience. 

Moreover, when we stand face to face with 
Christ, whose conscience is at ease? We know 
we fall short—how short, alas! we know not. 
And, in the stirring of conscience we are di- 
rectly aware of God. If anything in this 
world is religious experience, it is to be found 
in the moments when conscience is awake— 
that conscience which is the clear, authentic 
voice of God. Even as in times past He spake 
to our fathers, so precisely He speaks to us, 
when, standing at gaze upon Christ, our hearts 
tell us that we have sinned. And, inwrought 
with that, there comes the continual allure- 
ment of the beauty and goodness of the Lord, 
with its consequent and most divinely-inspired 
discontent with anything less than Himself. 


110 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


For ah! the Master is so fair, 

So sweet His smile to banished men, 
That they who meet Him unaware 

Can never rest on earth again. 


And all this is religious experience—defi- 
nite, reformative, vital. ‘The “needs-must” 
love of the highest, when we see it, stirs con- 
science: and conscience will not let us go, but 
gives us, as its most gracious gift, a restless- 
ness, a longing and a desire which toss us back 
upon His breast—in all of which we are deal- 
ing directly with God and He with us. And 
forth from the distress so caused there comes, 
surely, a turning to His love, in its strength 
and completeness and tenderness, and an open 
ear to His offer of forgiveness, cleansing and 
friendship. We see His beauty reaching: its 
height in its pain, and the Christ of the Cross 
comes near. We need love and help so sorely 
that, with a kind of desperate hope, we lift our 
eyes to the love that is measured only by death. 
And then, -again, conscience is stirred; we 
know that there are two things we ought to do: 
we ought to make a definite decision of dis- 
cipleship and we ought to seek, and to go on 
seeking, for the nearness of His presence. 


THE FINAL AUTHORITY 111 


Once again, we are dealing directly with God: 
once again Eis voice echoes in the courts and 
chambers of the heart. 

Now, is it too much to claim that such is the 
experience of every one who has heard the 
Christian word? Think over it carefully: let 
us question ourselves, candidly, intimately. 
Does the excellence of Christ appear excellent 
tous? Face it: answer it. Are you prepared 
to criticize Him, to belittle Him? Will you 
stand up before the people and say that, to 
your eyes, He has no beauty that we should 
desire Him? If He were to come into the 
room would you, as Charles Lamb said he 
would be impelled to do, kneel down and kiss 
the hem of His garment; or would you turn 
from Him with a neglectful wave of the hand? 
Answer it, I say. Ah! we should cover our 
faces, our eyes blinded by the whiteness of His 
light; and our hearts would ache with shame 
and longing, just as they do ache when we 
permit ourselves to remember Him. And is 
there restlessness in that spirit of yours—a 
restlessness that will not be assuaged—a queer, 
insistent restlessness like a homesickness of the 
soul, when the thought of Him and all His 


112 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


love comes back? And do we not know full 
well that we ought, once and for all, to fling 
ourselves on His side and make ourselves His 
men for ever? Do we not know that we neglect 
approach to God at our peril? Face the thing: 
let the answer be made. Nothing but stark 
honesty will do in a matter so momentous. 
Nor is there any doubt about the reply: which 
enables us to say that we have had experience 
of religion; that we have passed, for a moment 
beyond the poor realm of time and space into 
the region of the things that are real. 

But this is only the beginning. Religious 
experience is in part a reward, but it is also 
in part a spur. We must act on the im- 
pulses that conscience gives, or our religious 
sight will fade. Everything depends on ac- 
tion now. “Prevenient grace,” as our fathers 
would say, has been at work: but now we must 
work out our own salvation, because it is God 
that worketh in us. Many men are living in 
a pitiable contentment, smiling at the exuber- 
ances of the religions, and disbelieving in the 
whole thing as the by-product of unbalanced 
nervous systems, because long ago they failed 
to act on the religious experience they once 


THE FINAL AUTHORITY 113 


possessed. They, despite their success and ap- 
parent placidity, are life’s real tragedies—men 
to whom the door was open once, but who 
closed it themselves. But if a man acts when 
he has the chance, and throws the will in one de- 
cisive movement on the God-side in him, and 
sets himself daily to seek a deeper knowledge, 
gifts rich and rare are added unto him. Slow- 
ly, imperceptibly, he grows into a firmer be- 
lief in the reality and the power of the love 
of God: slowly, imperceptibly his own spirit 
grows in strength, until he becomes content 
with one day at a time, leaving yesterday and 
to-morrow in his Father’s hands, and finding 
himself, almost unconsciously, carrying bur- 
dens which once would have broken him; un- 
til at last his conviction is based on something 
very deep and unquestioning, like a child’s 
trust in his father’s love and in his right to a 
place in his own home. In the apostle’s fine 
word, he is “persuaded”; and nothing, here or 
anywhere, can disturb him from his rest. 

Ah, well! few of us have that final authority 
to rest on as we should. But we have a little, 
surely. God has not been this long time with 
us that we have not known Him at all. And 


114 MODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM 


of this we may be certain, that, if we mean 
business, our direct confidence will grow, until 
at last faith vanishes into sight and we know 
even also as we are known. Meantime, to aid 
and to inspire, we have the Bible, with the 
rrefragable testimony therein contained, which 
is the witness of the saints. 


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